For as long as people have said that there is one God, other people have said that there are two (or more), because, if there is only one, how do you explain evil? Why would one God, the good God, make his people suffer so? The grandfather of dualist doctrines in Europe is Manichaeanism, which flourished in the early Christian era. It died out, but dualism didn't, and in the twelfth century a new variation, Catharism, arrived in the West, probably by way of the Balkans, and settled in Languedoc, in southern France. The Catharists maintained that the cosmos was divided between a good God and an evil one. The evil one had created the material world. Therefore all matter was sinfulness, and anyone who hoped for salvation would deal with it abstemiously—eat no meat, touch no money, have no sex. Lying and violence were also forbidden. The Cathars condemned the Catholic Church in the strongest possible terms—”the mother of fornication,” one Cathar elder called it—not just for its laxities, its brocaded bishops and lecherous friars, but more for its orthodoxies, for legitimatizing humankind's meat-eating and childbearing and merrymaking. Chaste and austere, the Cathar priests carried their message from town to town and won many converts. It is estimated that a quarter to a third of the people in Languedoc were sympathetic to Catharism, if not enrolled in the faith.

So this was an important heresy, perhaps the most important, apart from Protestantism, that the Church ever faced, and Europeans take it seriously. What the Boston Tea Party is to us, the story of the Cathars (with a very different ending) is to the French: a golden legend, a symbol of righteous refusal. Particularly in the late nineteenth century, when a number of leading intellectual trends—regionalism, mysticism, anti-authoritarianism, the cult of simplicity—locked in with the old heresy, Catharism was widely written about. Interest revived during the Second World War; the Cathars looked like an early version of the Resistance. Later, they appealed to the counterculture movements born of the sixties. Still today, they are beloved of vegetarians, pacifists, eco-hikers. Partly, I imagine, as a result of similar, countercultural sympathy, partly to contest countercultural mythmaking—and also in response to the revival of religious war—there has recently been a bonanza of books on Catharism, notably Stephen O'Shea's “The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars” (Walker; $25) and René Weis's “The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars, 1290-1329″ (Knopf; $35). Meanwhile, Jonathan Sumption's 1978 “The Albigensian Crusade” (Faber; $15) is out in paperback. There are even travel books. Rion Klawinski's “Chasing the Heretics: A Modern Journey Through the Medieval Languedoc” (Ruminator; $15) will tell you which road to take to get to where Giraude de Lavaur, the daughter of a prominent Cathar, was dropped down a well and had stones thrown on her until she died, and how to find a decent pizza in the vicinity.

The Church dealt with the heresy temperately at first. The Pope, Innocent III, sent priests from his holiest order, the Cistercians, to remonstrate with the formerly faithful. But they had little success. In town after town, the people welcomed the Cistercians, professed their orthodoxy, and then, once the gates were closed on the good brothers, fell back into the arms of the Cathars.

As the Pope knew, this would not have happened if the Cathars had not had the protection of the feudal lords of Languedoc, notably Raymond VI, the count of Toulouse; Raymond Roger, the count of Foix; and Raymond Roger Trencavel, the viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne. These men had no love of the Vatican or of any presumed authority beyond their walls. Though on paper Languedoc was subject to northern rule, in fact it was independent, and not just politically. It had its own language—the langue d'oc, or Occitan, closer to Catalan than to French—and its own culture. The Franks were pious, conformist, and warlike; the Occitans, fun-loving and freethinking. Toulouse, the third-largest city in Latin Christendom (after Rome and Venice), was full of foreigners, bearing silks and spices and books. Ideas were discussed; beauty was prized; people washed, or women did. There were “new men,” merchants, getting rich. And the Jews from whom they borrowed their money were not just tolerated; in some towns, they were appointed to public office. Women, or, at least, noblewomen, held positions of power and entertained poets by their hearths. It was in the castles of Languedoc that the literature of courtly love was created, celebrating adultery and erotic transport.

What these jaunty folk found to admire in the stern creed of Catharism is an interesting question, but the new faith had a convenient two-tiered behavioral code. If you underwent a rite called the consolamentum (consolation), you became a Cathar priest, or “perfect,” and you more or less had to be perfect. But the great majority of Cathars were not perfects; they were only credentes (believers), and for them things were different. They understood that the world was evil. Nevertheless, they postponed the consolamentum until they were dying, and before that they lived agreeably loose lives. As the saying goes, when everything is forbidden, everything is allowed. For example, Cathar doctrine held married sex in lower esteem than the extramarital variety, for it cloaked its carnality in a specious legitimacy. The same with meat-eating. It was always bad; to refrain during Lent was hypocrisy. So the Cathar faithful ate a lot of ham and had a lot of sex, and looked forward with sincere hearts to the deathbed rite that would wipe these sins away.

The foremost southern nobles were not Cathars, but many of their kin were, especially the women. The Count of Foix's sisters, his mother, and his aunt were Cathars. His wife, too. With his permission, she went off to become a perfect. But it was not just family feeling that endeared Catharism to the nobles. In most of Languedoc, inheritance was not based on primogeniture, whereby the oldest son got everything and the other sons had to go to the Crusades or become priests. Instead, property was divided among all the children. Accordingly, estates shrank with each generation. There was many a southern viscount whose dominion, in the words of the historian Jonathan Sumption, consisted of “a hundred acres and a quarter of a dilapidated castle.” The Church owned a lot of rich land in Languedoc, and it bled the peasants with taxes—an eighth of their cheese, a tenth of their wheat—thus preventing the nobles from doing so. This was bitterly resented. Raymond VI repeatedly seized Church property. Raymond Roger of Foix, a fearless man, actually installed a house for Cathar perfects, directed by his mother, on one of the estates of the local abbey. When the canons of the abbey tried to expel the Cathars, one of them was hacked to death on the altar. In other words, a guerrilla war between the southern lords and the Church was already under way. Any creed that condemned the Church—forget the rest—was O.K. by the southern nobility.

The Church was not slow to respond to such affronts. In 1207, the Pope excommunicated Raymond VI and released his subjects from their obligations to him. When the papal legate arrived at Raymond's court to negotiate with him, hard words were exchanged. Soon afterward, as the legate, journeying homeward, was crossing the Rhône, a horseman materialized on the shore and drove a lance through his back. The Pope's chosen representative lay dead in the mud. That was the end of the Church's willingness to reason with Languedoc.

In fact, the Pope's prior reasonableness was due in part to his lack of success in getting anyone to apply force. For several years, he had been trying to rouse Philip Augustus, the King of France, to invade Languedoc, and he had recently renewed his appeal, adding potent inducements. Anyone who joined what was now called the Albigensian Crusade (the Cathars were thought to be concentrated in the town of Albi) was offered the same spiritual reward as the knights who were fighting the Crusades in Palestine: a plenary indulgence, a guaranteed ticket to Heaven. As for earthly rewards, the lands of the rebel lords were offered to those who could seize them. Before, Philip Augustus had hesitated. Now he became more interested.

In 1209, an army of about twenty thousand came down on the south like dogs. In the first major encounter, the French took the town of Béziers in three hours. It is said that soldiers asked Arnald-Amaury, the head of the Cistercians and the leader of the Crusade, how to distinguish between Cathars and Catholics in meting out punishment—to which he replied, “Kill them all. God will know his own.” That story may be apocryphal, but the army did kill them all, about twenty thousand men, women, and children, including the Catholic priests, in the space of a morning. (The remains of a mass grave were discovered under the floor of a church in 1840.) In some towns, the invaders were more merciful; they just killed the heretics. Normally, they burned them en masse—a hundred and forty at Minerve, three hundred at Lavaur. Some of the Cathars, it is said, walked joyfully to the pyre. Others had to be thrown.

Though the southern nobles won some battles, they never really had a chance. Disparities of wealth had made them jealous and fractious—they could not unite against the enemy. Raymond VI, to protect his lands, actually joined the war on the side of the French. By the middle of the century, the south had fallen. Languedoc was scorched rubble, and it belonged to France.

But it still housed heretics. The crusaders had not destroyed Catharism; they had merely driven it underground. Thus began the Inquisition, which was more terrible in certain respects than the Crusade, for the warfare was now psychological. The job was given to the Dominicans, and apart from the fact that they seldom used torture—the Pope didn't like it—they operated in the usual manner. First, they appealed to people's grudges and greed. (Many people suddenly recalled seeing their old enemies in conversation with Cathars.) Then, once the accused were before them, they offered leniency in exchange for information. Even good people named others, and the others named others. It is hard to say how many were burned: probably several thousand. The remainder were imprisoned or released with penances. By these methods the Church, having killed a large percentage of the people of Languedoc, destroyed the rest morally. Neighbors could no longer look each other in the face.

Even then, Catharism did not die, and at the end of the thirteenth century there was actually a revival of the heresy in the southernmost towns, including the village of Montaillou, in the foothills of the Pyrénées. At that time, Montaillou had a population of about two hundred and forty, most of whom were Cathars. Eventually, the Inquisition caught up with them. In 1308, everyone in town over the age of fourteen was arrested. This in itself would have granted Montaillou no immortality. But in the twenty-odd years of interrogations that followed, one of the inquisitors, by chance, was Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers, and he brought to his task an almost disinterested curiosity and patience. He detained the accused, he drew them out—he was the Studs Terkel of fourteenth-century Languedoc.

Again, this would not have meant much, but, in 1334, Fournier became Pope Benedict XII, with the result that the Fournier Register (the transcript of his interrogations—every word was recorded) ended up in the Vatican. For seven hundred years it moldered in a vault. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, French historians went over to the annales movement, whereby history was no longer to be the chronicle of the deeds of great men but of the lives of ordinary people, retrievable from the annals of the past: tax records, parish registers, and—lo and behold—Inquisition transcripts. The Fournier Register was soon published. It fired the brain of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, one of the annales historians, and in 1975 he produced his miraculous book “Montaillou.”

Le Roy Ladurie found that, by studying what people told Fournier about the heresy, he could glean a great deal about their lives as a whole. When a Montallian reports that he lifted the corner of his neighbor's roof and saw two Cathar missionaries dining in her kitchen, one learns something about the construction of houses in Montaillou. When Béatrice de Planissoles, the local chatelaine, reports that one night she and her lover, Pierre Clergue, the town's Catholic (secretly Cathar) priest—also an informer to the Inquisition—fornicated in the church, one discovers something about the extent of Cathar scorn for Catholicism. On and on it goes. It's like a soap opera but better, because it's also a suspense story (we can almost hear the Inquisition coming down the road), and a serious narrative about the human search for meaning. Raymond de l'Aire says that one day he was cutting grass with Pierre Rauzi when Pierre asked him, “Do you believe that God and the Blessed Mary are something—really?” He replied yes, of course. Then Pierre said, “God and the Blessed Virgin Mary are nothing but the visible world around us; nothing but what we see and hear.” What God is, how to get to Heaven, what Heaven will be like: they talked about it all the time.

That was normal in the Middle Ages. Such questions are the subject of the Divine Comedy, which Dante was writing even as Raymond and Pierre were cutting the grass. But we never get close to Dante's characters. We wouldn't dare. Francesca da Rimini, Farinata degli Uberti: between us and them stand their high rhetoric and their damnation. With the people of Montaillou, however, we see their faces, hold their hands. Because of Le Roy Ladurie's book—and its source, the Fournier Register—we know more about Montaillou than about any other medieval community.

“Montaillou” was a big hit in France—Mitterrand used to read it during Cabinet meetings—and Barbara Bray's lovely English translation, published in 1978, has sold more than a hundred thousand copies in paperback. (And that's just the Vintage edition.) The book has raised the bar on later histories of Catharism. Stephen O'Shea's “Perfect Heresy” is the report of a good journalist. O'Shea is especially useful on background. He tries to give you the basics: what the Cathars believed, how a catapult works, and so on. He is overly fond of cliffhangers and portents and the pride that goeth before the fall, but such things help to keep one awake during the war conferences. And, if his book is heavy on sex and violence, so was thirteenth-century Languedoc. Historians tell us that the word “Cathar” may come from the Greek word for “pure,” or it may be a corruption of a German term for a sexual perversion involving household cats. (Like most fringe groups, the Cathars were accused of elaborate sexual crimes.) But, in my experience, only O'Shea has been willing to say what the perversion was (see page 270).

If O'Shea's book is the Oliver Stone movie of the Cathar conflict, Jonathan Sumption's “The Albigensian Crusade” is the George Eliot novel. Sumption has an English way of assuming that he can understand other people, even if they're medieval or the Pope. Accordingly, his book has a moral heft unshared by any of its competitors. Sumption tells you truths you don't want to know: that Languedoc culture was in decline (we want it to be in noonday flower) when the French came to destroy it; that the Capetian bureaucrats who took over Languedoc after the war (nasty colonial governors, we hope) ran a better government than their southern predecessors; that the corrupt Catholic priests whom the Cathars so despised were not really scoundrels but mostly poor schmoes. In the north, because of primogeniture, smart, ambitious men became priests. They had few other choices. In the south, the Church got every parish's least talented sons, and, in Sumption's words, “most were more demoralized than corrupt.” To read this is to have one's judgmentalism short-circuited, and to feel the tears of things.

With his ease in handling contraries, Sumption creates unforgettable characters. The best is his portrait of Innocent III, who tried to eradicate the heresy and to be a just man at the same time. (Innocent had been a lawyer before he became Pope; Sumption is a lawyer, too.) Also marvellous is his study of Simon de Monfort, the foremost French general, oxlike, pious, and fearless— a sort of war machine—who, having been instructed to wipe out the heresy, was then forced to listen endlessly to the Pope's scruples about canon law, feudal law, other law.

Finally, Knopf has published a strange book, “The Yellow Cross,” by René Weis, a professor of English at University College London. Like Le Roy Ladurie, Weis has limited his subject to late Catharism, and largely to Montaillou. Therefore he has a problem: he has to fight his way out of Le Roy Ladurie's long shadow. The way he copes with this is, first, to dispute a number of Le Roy Ladurie's conclusions without identifying them as such, and, second, to accumulate so much detail that no one can ever claim that there wasn't more to be said on the subject of Montaillou. Add to this what seems a mild obsession with Richard Holmes's “footsteps” theory—that the historian should find the very place where so-and-so ate his lunch or forded the river—and you have a book in which the particulars utterly swamp any general conclusions, not to speak of their effect on storytelling. At one point, Weis interrupts a kidnapping conspiracy to tell us that the participants stopped to have dinner, and what they ate, and what pots they cooked it in, and how much it cost, and how that was more than somebody else paid for a comparable meal. By the time he is done, you have forgotten that Guillemette Piquier was being kidnapped. Nor is Weis a gifted translator: “Jeanne scoffed, 'Ha, you old heretical cowherdess, you need a solid squeezing, since you're brimful of heresy!' “

He is also aggressively, anachronistically judgmental. The medieval Church, he tells us, was a “savagely repressive regime.” Well, yes. This is the medieval Church. Likewise, no historical relativism blunts his indignation when it comes to sexual adventurers. When Pierre Clergue, the priest—having been through Béatrice de Planissoles and half the other women in town—turns his attention to Grazide Rives, aged fourteen or fifteen, and deflowers her in her family's barn, it is because he is a “ruthless” man, a “demonic” Lothario who “indoctrinated” Grazide with his “free-love cant.” As Weis is forced to add soon afterward (he doesn't cheat), the afternoon in the barn was the beginning of an affair that lasted several years, with the knowledge of Grazide's mother and, eventually, her husband. (She married when she was sixteen.) Their complaisance was unquestionably due to Clergue's power in Montaillou. But, according to Grazide, she liked Clergue, and, as she told Fournier, she did not consider sex to be a sin as long as both parties enjoyed it. So Clergue—or Catharism, or maybe the folkways of fourteenth-century Pyrenean peasants—indoctrinated her pretty well.

If this is how Weis treats heterosexual misbehavior, one can imagine what he thinks of the other kind. The disportings of the local homosexual, Arnaud de Verniolles, with the teen-age boys of the neighborhood are described by Le Roy Ladurie with a Gallic calm: “Sometimes, before proceeding to the main point, the lovers would dress in tunics and wrestle and dance. . . . Arnaud used to give his young men little presents. . . . All this served to fill his leisure time, especially in the holidays.” Here, and also in the matter of Clergue and Grazide, Le Roy Ladurie does not disguise the politics involved. The seducer had power; the seduced bowed to power, and was lucky or not in his or her seducer. “He did it gently,” Grazide says of Clergue. He “threatened me with a knife,” Guillaume Ros says of de Verniolles. (Arnaud says Guillaume consented. The boy had had prior homosexual experience.) Weis records these complications, but they do not affect his verdict. Arnaud, he says, was a “serial sex offender,” the author of “heinous” acts.

Such views make for a Cathar history altogether different from Sumption's or Le Roy Ladurie's. “The Yellow Cross” is the story of bad people persecuting good people, and, not incidentally, of René Weis's indignation about that. Sumption's book is a history of the Catholic Church, not good or bad but just very much there, bringing into line people who, again, were not good or bad but decent enough. The book is a tragedy. At times, it seems to owe as much to Shakespeare as to the chronicles of medieval Languedoc.

The same is true of Le Roy Ladurie's “Montaillou,” but this book is not a tragedy. It is a dark comedy. Although almost everyone in it loses eventually, and horribly, the emphasis is not on loss but on enjoyment—how the people sat in the sun and deloused each other and gossiped, how they had dinner and then talked about God till cockcrow. Yes, Pierre Clergue was a scoundrel and an informer, but he was also a peerless bedmate—gentle, imaginative, responsible about birth control (he brought you a lavalliere with special herbs)—and shouldn't he get credit for that? Yes, your neighbors would turn against you, but not always, not when they didn't have to. When the bishop's constables came after a shepherd named Pierre Maury, he baked them an enormous pie, and they liked it so much that they thanked him and went away. He was eventually arrested, but not for several more years. The light would shine, and then the night would fall. That was all right, the people felt. God would reach down his hand, and, if they had taken the consolamentum, he would scoop them up and take them to Heaven.

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