Prussian Socialism Episode 44: Cathars, Troubadours, and Occitania: the Land of Love

"Kill them all, for God knows his own"... the infamous words of Bishop Arnaud-Amaury as an crusader army butchered the entire town of Béziers. Muslims and Jews? No. Christians.

The Albigensian Crusade was the first intra-European holy war. Waged against the Cathar neo-gnostic faith, the crusade left a trail of death and horror across southern France between 1209 and 1229.

It destroyed not only the Cathars, and the budding civilization of Occitania, the first flowing of secular culture in Western Europe since the fall of Rome.

A land of knight-poets and world-denying mystics, Occitania was the home of "courtly love", the wild idea that women can have a purpose other than mere breeding.

Were the Cathars and their sympathizers the good guys? Or were they dangerous heretics, dedicated to the physical annihilation of mankind?

Join Gregory Conte for this blood- and love-soaked lecture as we celebrate Valentine's Day in... Occitania: La Terra d'Amor.