Cathars and al-Quaeda: The Struggle against Heresy and Terror

When I found last year that I was going to visit the Occupied Palestinian territory on the West Bank in the summer of 2007, I was determined to offer my widow’s mite in the form of free lectures to local universities. Finding a willing host was easier than I had been led to expect. But what could a historian of the Christian Middle Ages offer that Palestinian students and their professors could be interested in? I am neither qualified to pronounce publicly on current politics nor did I wish to court expulsion or worse.           The answer was, of course, the Albigensian Crusade! Heresy has been said to lie in the eye of the beholder. Heretics were felt to threaten the very fabric of Christendom’s culture. But how could believers in a Decalogue that holds so clearly that “Thou shalt not kill” protect themselves from its insidious threats? First, preachers tried persuasion, then threats. They then diverted from the other infidels and the birthplace of God-as-Man in the Holy Land the emerging institution of crusade. Success remained incomplete, so the Church set about working for the long haul to track down and root out every last heretic, through the nascent Inquisition, aided occasionally and where appropriate, by physical coercion in the form of carefully regulated torture.            Crusade and the Inquisition are rightly singled out among the formational contributions of the Middle Ages to Western civilization. To inspire audiences to find parallels from their own experiences is a worthwhile goal for every historian to aim at. The three very different audiences in my three universities each responded in its own fashion. Mostly, they were pleased to have a visitor, any visitor from the West.