Cathar Country: the good men, the crusade and the last pyre

A Christian Church that rejects this world

The “Cathars” never called themselves by that name. The word comes from a Rhineland monk, Eckbert of Schönau, who used it in 1163 against heretics in Cologne, and it was applied to the people of Languedoc only in the writings of their adversaries. They called themselves simply Christians; their religious, men and women, were the “good men” and the “good women”, whom the inquisitors would call “perfects” — perfecti, in the sense of “accomplished heretics”. Around them, the mass of “believers” lived like everyone else, married, ploughed, traded, and were content to venerate the good men and to hope to receive from their hands, at the point of death, the only sacrament that counted.