Travel Planning II: Reason to Travel

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Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. -Miriam Beard

It’s not enough just to go places. After a while, each chateau resembles the last. “The one with the deep blue ceiling embedded with stars–which one was that?” you ask your spouse. The ruins of a fortress become just another rubble pile, a picnic spot with a view.

Throughout the area we’ll be travelling in the south of France are the remains of Cathar strongholds with names that echo down from history. When I began my search for places to explore, I had little idea who these Cathars were. One would expect a military presence, maybe a southwest version of the raging Mongols, from the prominence of castles; or maybe a branch of the Moors, from their proximity to Spain. But castles, of course, are built in defense, while raging hoards are the attackers, and these castles are distinctly not Moorish, but rather look like Sleeping Beauty’s resting place had the prince not come to kiss her.

A good guidebook offers a bit of history, as do web pages of the region, aimed at the traveller with a casual interest. For she who likes to immerse herself in her landscape, these tidbits only serve to pique the appetite. So I’m reading history books. Right now, I’m reading “The Inquisition”, by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. More on these authors to follow.


The Cathars

The Cathars were a Christian sect that denounced the Catholic Church and its extravagant ways. They looked to the life of Jesus and attempted to follow his lead; they lived in poverty and humility, and believed that the life of the flesh was the incarnation of evil while divinity resided solely in the spiritual realm. The Catholic Church at the time, ostensibly a religious institution, was more a self-driven political machine aimed at keeping power and wealth in the hands of the pope and his bishops. The Church had imaginative ways of insuring the tithe, including the selling of indulgences, whereby a sinner could pay off the priest to be forgiven. The church held scripture tightly to its chest, not allowing translation into common languages; this enabled any number of twists to the “word of God” to work in the church’s favour. Martin Luther was the most famous of objectors to the ways of the Catholic Church, but he was not the first. The Cathars were not the first, either, having been preceded by the Gnostics and the Balkan Bogomils. Their ideas had emerged previously, with the Eastern Orthodox Church and 3rd-century Manichaeanism (from the Persian teacher, Mani).

I don’t know anything about these last entities–the reading of history always plants the seeds for more reading.

The Cathars first appeared on Catholic radar around the beginning of the 13th century, when the Crusades were already in full swing. In 1208, Pope Innocent III (love the irony of Papal names!) turned the crusade idea inward to people within Europe’s boundaries for the first time, to the heretics known as Cathar (“the purified”), also known as Albigensians after Albi, one of their centers. This first internal crusade, the Albigensian Crusade, was headed by a new institution formed by the pope: the Inquisition. We all know what followed.


The Dominicans

The monk Dominic encountered the Cathars in his travels and was the first, along with his travelling partner the Bishop of Osma, to bring the Cathar heresy to Pope Innocent’s attention in 1203 or 1204. “The Inquisition” labels him as a fanatic who “rode with the spearhead of the crusaders’ army”. It is interesting that he learned by observing the Cathars: they spread their word through educated wandering preachers; thus, he set up his organization of travelling friars, trained in the art of persuasion, to counteract the heretical preachers. He also adopted the ideal of poverty and himself wore a hair robe, whipped himself publicly, and generally lived the ascetic life. I suppose “fighting fire with fire” is an unfortunate analogy, but that seems to have been Dominic’s method.

When the Cathars could not be brought back into Catholicism “through sweetness and blessing”, he appeared to become enraged and took up “the stick” to combat the heresy. “We . . . will cause many people to die by the sword, will ruin your towers, overthrow and destroy your walls and reduce you all to servitude.” (Vicare, Saint Dominic and His Times, p. 146.)

The views of Baigent and Leigh are clear: Dominic was a raging fanatic. Dominic died in 1221 and was canonized in 1234 by Pope Gregory IX, who happened to be an old buddy of Dominic. His order, the Dominicans, were the original Inquisitors.

The Cathars were systematically exterminated. The last Cathar was burned in 1321. The last one.


If you go to the website of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans), Saint Dominic is depicted as merciful and acting on behalf of the persecuted. Wikipedia suggests some controversy around his history, that his participation in the Inquisition is not established. In short, there appears to have been some whitewashing of his story.

Behind our hotel in Collioure is a Dominican winery. No doubt we will visit and enjoy the wares. I can’t help but wonder about the current Dominicans, what of their own history they believe, and how they might respond to allegations that their founder might have been less than saintly.

I don’t believe we can be held responsible for the “sins of the fathers”, but the idea of collective guilt about the past intrigues me. I picked up a book about the phenomenon, written by Bernhard Schlink, author of “The Reader”; I have not read it yet, but in the first few pages, he tells how his generation (which is my generation) still makes frequent reference to the Third Reich and the Holocaust, as though still trying to reconcile with the past. I don’t have any answers, but I will be asking questions, when I travel.


How I'd make a million if I could beat Dan Brown to it

Back to the authors of “The Inquisition”. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh also wrote “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” in 1982. I read it way back then, and have forgotten most of its details, but when I read “The Da Vinci Code” a couple of years ago, the ideas were strikingly familiar. Dan Brown took his thesis from the Baigent/Leigh book, and wrote a ripping tale out of it. If I had a modicum of Brown’s story-telling capability, I’d tackle “The Inquisition” and make a mint of my own.

It is interesting to note that “The Holy Blood. . . ” was panned by serious historians as pseudo-history. (I never thought it was actually meant to be history, in fact.) That could signal that the authors’ ideas about Dominic and his role in the Inquisition might not be entirely dependable. That’s a pity, because he makes a wonderful bad guy, along with the Catholic Church.

Incidentally, all histories of the Inquisition were included in the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, established in the mid-16th Century. Any Catholic reading them risked excommunication. The Index was not finally abolished until 1966.



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