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The history of the Cathars and the misnamed Cathar Castles

On this route we go through the misnamed “Cathar Castles”, you will see why, an area in the south of France, near Catalonia. Located in a region of the department of the Eastern Pyrenees and the Aude.

In reality, most Cathar castles are not castles as such, but are fortresses built in the Corbières mountains, after the end of the civil and religious wars of the thirteenth century. Only some were besieged during some of the crusades by the nobles who supported Catharism, but not all. At the end of that conflict the new power belonged to the King of France who, to defend the area from his Catalan-Aragonese neighbors, reinforced the territory with a series of pre-existing fortresses, in the Corbières mountains. This is the real reason for the existence of these fortresses.

But it is already known that the Cathar myth, the myth of Montsegur, sounds better to many people today, which is why, in an act of ignorance and mythology, this Cathar religious current is associated with the castles of this area.

The Cathar myth: the truth

The reality of the Cathar myth is reduced to the mere struggle for power of different political entities in the Middle Ages that took advantage of religion to make a good excuse to fight for power.

The Cathar "heresy" was but a variant between the forks of medieval Christianity. Catharism was a response to usury and the enrichment of the nobility and clergy, but it contained in itself puritanical Christian traits and a totally sectarian mysticism. All very far from the simplistic idealization of many current neo-Cathars. That's the truth