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A Most Holy War - The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Paperback)
Loot Price: R374
Discovery Miles 3 740
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A Most Holy War - The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Paperback)
Series: Pivotal Moments in World History
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Loot Price R374
Discovery Miles 3 740
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In January of 1208, a papal legate was murdered on the banks of the
Rhone in southern France. A furious Pope Innocent III accused
heretics of the crime and called upon all Christians to exterminate
heresy between the Garonne and Rhone rivers--a vast region now
known as Languedoc--in a great crusade. This most holy war, the
first in which Christians were promised salvation for killing other
Christians, lasted twenty bloody years--it was a long savage battle
for the soul of Christendom.
In A Most Holy War, historian Mark Pegg has produced a
swift-moving, gripping narrative of this horrific crusade, drawing
in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the
years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women,
remembering what it was like to live through such brutal times,
bring the story vividly to life. Pegg argues that generations of
historians (and novelists) have misunderstood the crusade; they
assumed it was a war against the Cathars, the most famous heretics
of the Middle Ages. The Cathars, Pegg reveals, never existed. He
further shows how a millennial fervor about "cleansing" the world
of heresy, coupled with a fear that Christendom was being eaten
away from within by heretics who looked no different than other
Christians, made the battles, sieges, and massacres of the crusade
almost apocalyptic in their cruel intensity. In responding to this
fear with a holy genocidal war, Innocent III fundamentally changed
how Western civilization dealt with individuals accused of
corrupting society. This fundamental change, Pegg argues, led
directly to the creation of the inquisition, the rise of an
anti-Semitism dedicated to the violent elimination of Jews, and
even the holy violence of the Reconquista in Spain and in the New
World in the fifteenth century. All derive their divinely
sanctioned slaughter from the Albigensian Crusade.
Haunting and immersive, A Most Holy War opens an important new
perspective on a truly pivotal moment in world history, a first and
distant foreshadowing of the genocide and holy violence in the
modern world.
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