The rise of heresy and of protests against the corruption of the Papacy
was another very grave pretext of the Church to support the military
system. In the days of Gregory VII a body of Puritans known as the
Patareni spread over the north of Italy, and Rome encouraged a few
soldiers to lead armed mobs against them and drown their idealism in
blood. Innocent III has a more terrible stigma on his record. The
Albigensians, an early type of Protestants, were spreading in the south
of France, and the Pope sanctioned a "crusade"--an expedition, largely,
of looters and cut-throats--against them from all parts of France. The
appalling deceit practised by the Papal Legate and sanctioned by the
Pope, the ferocity of the campaign, and the desolation brought on one of
the happiest and most prosperous provinces of France, may be read in any
history of the thirteenth century. Tens of thousands of men, women, and
children were savagely put to death. And this was only the beginning of
the Papal war on heresy, which from the thirteenth century never ceased
to spring up in Europe until it won its right of citizenship in the
Reformation. Even more vehemently was war urged against the Moors, then
the most civilised people in Europe.
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