Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324

In 1318, the Inquisition arrested an entire village to stomp out the last remnants of the Cathar heretic movement. After the arrests, they conducted a detailed interrogation of all the villagers and some people from neighboring villages.

The bishop leading the local Inquisition later got elected Pope, brought all the records with him, so now it’s all preserved in the Vatican Library. These records, called the Fournier Register, remain one of the best written sources we have about the life, habits and beliefs of medieval peasants, of whom otherwise the chronicles rarely speak.

French historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, analyzed the records and published his learnings in his 1975 book.

Many details from the book were fascinating, though I’m still confused about a lot of things and I’m a little frustrated that the author didn’t try to answer some questions that confused me most. I also think the book is unnecessarily long, and I think it’s plausibly a better use of one’s time to directly read inquisitorial records from the Fournier register. Most of it is unfortunately not translated to English, but the interrogation reports that were available were very interesting, and I believe one could hunt down the rest in French and translate them to English with LLMs.

So altogether I’m not sure I recommend reading the full book, but I will collect the most interesting takeaways I learned from reading it.

Nationality

• The English title of the book is a mistranslation. Montaillou was an Occitan, and not a French, village. The Occitan language is closer to Catalan than to French, and Occitania was only fairly recently absorbed into the Kingdom of France at the time the book is set. The villagers usually think of France as something far away.

• On the other hand, Catalonia is next door, people constantly migrate between Catalonia and Occitania. Sometimes this is to flee from the Inquisition, sometimes for other reasons. In particular, shepherds with their flocks travel pretty long distances.

• This goes the other way around too, there are also shepherds from the south travelling to Occitania. I was surprised to see two Muslim shepherds and a Muslim fortune-teller appear in Occitania in the book. (They seem to get along fine with the local Christian shepherds.) Granada, at the southern tip of Spain, was still under Muslim rule, but I thought that mostly only the elites were Muslim. This made me surprised to see Muslim shepherds showing up.

Economy and social structure

• Most people live and work on their family’s land. Household size varies from two to maybe fifteen, but my understanding is that the average household is not much bigger than a modern household.

• No one is bound to the lord’s land, there is free migration and a fair amount of wage-based economy. (More on this later.) The farmers own their own land, but pay some taxes to the lord for being able to use the forest which belongs to him. The lord lives far away, but there is a minor nobleman representing him who lives in the small local castle. These taxes are not large and are considered fair. Interestingly, it looks like no one is really complaining about the lord.

• There is another person, the bayle, representing the lord; he is the one who is supposed to serve justice. He is a rich local peasant, and is the priest’s brother. Given that the priest is a pretty terrible and corrupt person, and based on some other evidence, I suspect the bayle is also corrupt. But I learned almost nothing about his activity, which I found disappointing. I would have been interested in learning about how the secular justice system worked, but there wasn’t anything in the book about secular crimes and punishment.

  • There was one murder in the village of 250 people in the twenty years covered by the book. The more common way of dealing with enemies was turning them in to the Inquisition with real or fabricated accusations.
  • I know very little about other crimes. Men sometimes brawl, and men often beat their wives and children (not a crime), but the general atmosphere feels less violent than in the autobiographies of Gorkij or Gyula Illyes. But it’s possible that the Inquisition records just focus less on these inter-personal conflicts and that’s why we don’t see them.

• While people feel fine paying taxes to the lord, they are really not fine with tithing to the Church. Sometimes entire neighboring villages got excommunicated for not paying their tithes properly. There is a lot of resentment in the region about tithes in general, and about tithes on sheep-products in particular, which has been newly introduced by the bishop.

  • It’s possible that resentment over tithes was greater in this region than in other places. One of my main gripes about the book is that the author doesn’t try hard enough to investigate how representative Montaillou was of other medieval villages, given that “we only have records from the place where the entire village got arrested by the Inquisition” is a pretty strong selection effect.

• Poorer men and second sons often become shepherds for wages. This wage is partially paid in money, partially by getting a share of new-born lambs. Contracts are only for a year, and shepherds often change employers. In time, a shepherd can build up a larger and larger flock of his own from his share of lambs, and herd them together with the employer’s flock. However, it’s very hard to collect enough money and sheep as a shepherd to be able to buy your own house and land. The best you can hope for is that you build a respectable enough flock that a son-less land-owner marries his daughter to you. But even this seems to be rare, and my impression is that the large majority of shepherds never manage to start their own household and family.

• It’s not clear to me what counter-balances the fact that many men remain unmarried. Most women seem to marry between 18 and 20, but many poorer girls also work as domestic servants for a while. This also seems to be a fairly free and wage-based employment. The girls have yearly contracts they often negotiate for themselves, and they change employers when someone offers better pay or conditions. It was still not an easy life, and the servant girls aimed to get married eventually, and my impression is that most of them succeeded. So I’m still confused about where the unmarried women were, to counter-balance the large number of unmarried shepherds. If I remember correctly, the book never mentions a woman dying in child-birth, but possibly that decreased the number of women? Or more of the servant girls failed to get married, or widows to get remarried?

Sexuality

• The peasant society is surprisingly sexually permissive. (To be clear, I think this is probably mostly a bad thing given the lack of modern birth control.)

  • Adultery is frowned upon, but existent. My guess would be that one in ten married women has a lover, and the husband sometimes knowingly turns a blind eye if the lover was a powerful enough person. I think at least half the men cheat on their wives at least occasionally.
  • Sexual relations with unmarried servant girls and widows are basically totally acceptable and common. I think about one tenth of people live in open cohabitation and no one finds this strange.
  • Around one in ten children is illegitimate, and their social status doesn’t seem worse than the status of second sons.
  • For the women in the book, it looks like having had sexual relationships during widowhood or as a young servant doesn’t seem to really hurt the prospect of marrying or remarrying. Women can often get married even if they have an illegitimate child. But I suspect this might not always be true, and maybe this is what counter-balances the unmarried shepherds.

• The book mentions homosexuality, but only in the clergy and in the cities. I’m a little surprised it’s not mentioned among the shepherds. My impression from other sources was that when men live closely together without women (prisons, ships, homeless encampments, British boarding schools), homosexuality often becomes pretty common. So I’m surprised it’s never mentioned among the shepherds who also often spend a long time together in small cabins, far from women.

• Montaillou doesn’t have its own prostitute, but when men go to the town to the market, they often use the prostitutes there. My impression is that at least half the men have had relations with prostitutes.

• Most people genuinely seem to not know that religion opposes these irregular sexual relations. They sometimes talk about what God considers a sin, someone even asks a wandering friar, but the conclusion they come to is close to modern secular morality: as long as both sides enjoy it or the prostitute gets a fair payment, it’s not a sin.

  • Again, it’s possible that other villages were better informed about the Church’s position; Montaillou had an unusually bad priest. But cohabitation was normal even before this priest, and it looks like men from other villages also visit the prostitutes. I think most of the effect is not specific to Montaillou.

• There is some violent rape, but it seems rare and frowned upon. There are unequal relationships with servant girls where it’s hard to know how properly consensual it is. Some men have affairs with widows, and those seem mostly consensual, the widows are pretty independent and we see them ending relationships when they have had enough.

• The village priest, Pierre Clergue, comes from a wealthy local peasant family. He is secretly a Cathar heretic, but after he gains the trust of the other Cathars (little more than half the village), he denounces the faith, and blackmails all the other Cathars with the threat of reporting them to the Inquisition. He drives many of his enemies into exile, and he gets one of his enemies to have her tongue torn out by the Inquisition. It helps in his operations that his brother is the bayle, the local representative of secular justice. He uses his power to blackmail families into letting him sleep with their women. I think he had about ten mistresses throughout his career. Altogether, not a great guy. To his credit, the women he slept with usually had surprisingly positive memories of him as a gentle person. Still, he is probably the worst person who appears in the book.

  • I think Pierre Clergue is a very unusually bad priest, but priests having at least one mistress seems normal in neighboring villages too. I would guess that about half the priests have a lover.

• Incest seems to be a surprisingly big deal in people’s thinking. When people talk about morality, incest being unacceptable always comes up, and everyone except the most hardcore nihilist (Pierre Clergue, the aforementioned priest), opposes it. My understanding is that it mostly means sexual relations up to the first cousin.

  • I was surprised that this is so prominent in their thinking. People still strongly oppose incest today, but if you asked people today to talk about morality and major sins, incest would rarely come up in the conversation. I assume that in the old world of people living with their family-members in big houses without private places, the temptation to incest was much stronger than it is today, so the taboo was more important to emphasize.

Death and illness

• Infant and child mortality is high, though we don’t have good numbers, because there is no record of most babies who died early. People are sad when their babies die.

• It seems like people really don’t know that illnesses are often contagious and are not afraid to spend time around sick people. The big exception is lepers. People are very afraid of them, even though my understanding is that leprosy is actually barely contagious.

  • I think it should count as a strong mark against theories valorizing cultural evolution that cultures didn’t learn such an important thing that many diseases are contagious.

Emotions

• People laugh a normal amount. I once heard a theory that laughing is a modern custom that only became widespread after improvement in dental hygiene. I never believed this theory, and this book is additional counter-evidence.

• On the other hand, people seem to cry somewhat more often than in modern society. It’s pretty normal in the book for grown men to start crying when receiving sad or happy news.

• Romantic love, including passionate romantic love, exists and people sometimes manage to marry for love. I think this is not surprising, but I heard theories that romantic love is a surprisingly late invention that spread from the elite circles. I never believed those theories, but this is additional counter-evidence.

• People love their children. Again, very unsurprising, but I have heard theories stating the contrary.

  • In Cathar mythology, when Satan tempted the souls in Heaven to descend into the material world and become humans, a main part of his pitch was that as humans they can have children, which is the greatest joy of all. I find this very endearing.

Other observations

• People rarely refer to weeks, and instead talk in terms of eight days and fifteen days (quarter month and half month). This is true even though the majority of people go to Mass on Sunday and they more or less rest on Sundays (though people who have animals can never fully rest). I find this very surprising, and makes me update that cultural patterns I consider obvious can be less universal than I would think.

• Not in Montaillou itself, but in a neighboring village, some people play chess in their spare time. Pretty cool.

Religion

• Catharism has mostly been eradicated generations before the book’s events, in the brutal Albigensian Crusade of the early 1200s. By the time of the book, there has been a short revival in Montaillou, spread by the last few remaining Cathar parfaits, plus there was an exiled community of Cathars in Catalonia. As far as I know, they were literally the last recorded Cathar communities in the world.

  • This makes it possible that the version of Catharism recorded in Montaillou was just a bare-bones remnant of the original, more widespread Cathar religion, and this might partially explain why their religion seems so strangely empty.

• I learned frustratingly little about the Cathar beliefs and practices from the book. It might be that people concealed a large part of their beliefs from the Inquisition, or that the Inquisition chose not to record some things. But it looks more likely from the book that the Cathars simply didn’t have very detailed beliefs or a very active religious life.

  • One of the main frustrations with the book is that the author never tries to speculate which of the statements recorded by the Inquisition were true, and which were lies either concocted by the peasants or inserted by the Inquisitions' scribes. I think this is a crucial question about the source material that the author should have engaged more with.

• The official version of Catharism seems to be a dualistic Gnostic religion. There is a good and an evil god - the good god created souls, the evil god created the material world. The evil god tempted some souls to descend into the material world, and trapped them in a cycle of reincarnation until they manage to break free and get back to immaterial Heaven. Going to Heaven can be achieved by becoming a parfait, or by a parfait performing an appropriate ritual on your death-bed. Parfaits live in relative poverty, don’t eat meat, and don’t touch women. That’s it, that’s about everything I learned about Cathar beliefs.

  • Many people believe in a folk version of dualism, where the good things (like flowers and sheep) were created by the good god, and bad things (like mosquitos and wolves) were created by the bad god. Some people seem to be genuinely confused about what the Catholic teaching is on this matter. At least one person seems very surprised when the Inquisition tells him that the Catholic position is that wolves were created by God instead of Satan.
  • At least one person also has the interesting take on dualism that bad people’s souls were created by the evil god, and good people’s souls by the good god, and eventually all souls end up with their creators, up or down. I find this belief more repulsive than standard predestination, but I don’t quite know why.

• The religion of Catholic peasants also seems pretty impoverished from a modern perspective.

• People almost never talk about loving Jesus, or having a personal relationship with Jesus or God. My understanding is that most of their prayers are repeating the Lord’s Prayer, the Credo and Ave Maria in Latin, and they rarely pray in their own way.

• People sometimes need to do some outwardly penance for sins (though as far as I know, only for heresy and for not paying tithes), like going on pilgrimage, wearing a yellow cross on their clothes, or buying a really big candle for the church. But I don’t remember inward repentance ever really being mentioned, or people feeling strong guilt for past crimes and looking to Jesus for forgiveness.

• I also don’t remember anyone mentioning forgiving your enemies. There is some mention of alms-giving, but there is much stronger emphasis on giving to the Church or to the parfaits than on giving to the poor.

• All of this seems true of Cathars as well as Catholics. The Cathars reject many of the teachings and practices of the Church, but as far as I can tell, don’t offer their own positive vision. At least based on the Montaillou records, I think it’s misguided to think of Cathars as proto-Protestants.

• The Bible is very rarely mentioned. I first found this very surprising. There was this big religious upheaval where the whole village was divided between Cathars and Catholics. I would have expected, based on the events of the Reformation, that people would constantly argue about which Bible passages support which sect. But no, when people are asked why they believe something, it’s almost always because they heard it from someone, who heard it from someone, who is sometimes said to have read it in a book, which is not specified to be the Bible.

  • I think the simple explanation is that it’s a largely pre-literate society. The printing press has not been invented yet, and a full Bible costs half as much as a big peasant house. I’m not even sure the priest has a full Bible.
  • Relatedly, as far as I can tell, the priest and an occasionally visiting Cathar parfait were the only literate people in the village. And even they didn’t really speak Latin, while the Bible hasn’t yet been translated to their language. Given this, it’s not surprising that the Bible isn’t a big part of their religious life.
  • After Mass, the priest is supposed to preach in the local language. But the priest himself also only learned decades ago what the teachings should be, and I think he learned it mostly in spoken word, as there weren’t really non-Latin books. No wonder much of the message was lost.
  • My understanding is that much of people’s religious education is supposed to come from the wandering friars, but there aren’t many of them in this region, and they are also relatively confused.
  • There is still respect for books though, maybe too much. “My uncle heard it from someone who read it in a book” is an argument that carries a lot of weight, without inquiring what the book is.

• Given that both Cathar and Catholic doctrine is pretty minimal and not very well-known, people often choose religion based on personal trust. Which is, to be fair, not the worst way to choose a religion.

  • The most common argument for Catharism is that “the parfaits are very holy men, they don’t eat meat and don’t touch women”. The weird thing though is that it’s always just these two things, and I couldn’t really understand what was so impressive about the parfaits. The Catholic priests also weren’t supposed to have relationship with women. Normal people couldn’t afford that much meat in the first place, so not eating meat doesn’t seem that impressive either. And it’s not like modern vegetarians can inspire devoted following by demonstrating the deep moral virtue of not eating meat.
  • Maybe the few local parfaits just have some strong personal charisma that’s hard to put in words. Or the local priests and wandering friars are so bad that the parfaits look perfect in comparison.

• Actually, one of the most prominent parfaits in the region also has a secret mistress, and is also generally a despicable parasite. But at least he hides this better than Pierre Clergue, Montaillou’s priest.

• Based on all of this, I would have expected their religion to largely resemble my picture of paganism, people being mostly praying and showing sacrifices in return of good harvest, health, and other worldly concerns. Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to be the case, the book says that praying for material benefits exists but is not very important.

• People care a lot about getting to Heaven though. Cathars and Catholics agree that Heaven is a very big house (presumably this idea is based on Revelation 21), where all people live as a big family. The presence of God and the beatific vision is not mentioned, but people are still very interested in getting into the nice big house of Heaven.

  • According to Catholics, the alternative is Hell, though people often seem to think more of a temporal Purgatory, and in general fear of Hell seems almost never mentioned. I’m a little surprised by this.
  • According to Cathars, the alternative to Heaven is reincarnation, often in animal bodies, until eventually one breaks the cycle and goes to Heaven. Reincarnation is viewed as worse than Heaven, but sometimes they still refer to it positively - for example a mother losing her young child is consoled that if she has a new child, the dead kid’s soul will enter the new baby.

• To a first approximation, all of religion seems to center around the question of which magic ritual you need to do on your death-bed to go to Heaven.

  • For Catholics, the magic ritual is the priest giving the final sacrament. Usually, I would be more respectful and not call this magic. But I don’t remember people really talking about repentance in the book, and confession exists but doesn’t seem to be taken very seriously, so I think modern Catholics wouldn’t be very satisfied with the peasants' relationship to the final sacrament.
  • For Cathars, as far as the author can tell, it’s just straightforwardly magic. A parfait performs a secret ritual when you are on the verge of death, then you stop eating and drinking for the rest of your life (which is usually a few hours to occasionally a few days), and then you are guaranteed to go to Heaven. Otherwise, you reincarnate. What you did in the rest of your life, or your state of mind at your death-bed is irrelevant, only the ritual counts.

• The Cathar death-bed ritual is called ‘heretication’ in the book, which I find very amusing. To be clear, this is the English translation of the French translation of the Latin word the Inquisition’s hostile scribe used for the Cathar practice that presumably had an Occitan name.

• Outside your death-bed, neither religion requires much. Cathars are asked to feed and shelter the parfaits and hide them from the Inquisition, so they can later give them the ritual on their death-bed. Helping the parfaits is a dangerous business, many people go to prison or have their fortune confiscated for this, so they make a genuine sacrifice for their religion here. But as far as I can tell, this is the only thing Catharism asks from its followers.

  • Catharism sometimes looks pretty nihilistic. Parfaits are supposed to be perfect (hence the name), but as far as I can tell, this mostly just means no meat and no women. Everyone else is equally infinitely sinful, since according to the official teachings, sex with your wife is equally sinful to rape or incest, so the only thing that matters is doing the magic ritual on your death-bed.
  • Some Cathar believers, like Pierre Clergue the heretical priest, accept the nihilistic conclusion. Clergue in fact commits rape and incest with the justification that it’s not worse than anything else in this infinitely sinful world. Other Cathars construct a secular ethical system around how it’s still better for everyone to live in peace and not do bad things with your neighbors, even if everything is equally sinful in the eyes of God. I find it somewhat heart-warming that they came up with this secular ethics.

• Catholics are supposed to go to Mass, and in fact about half the village goes on an average Sunday. They are supposed to pay tithes, and give various donations at the shrines of different saints.

  • Confession and taking communion is surprisingly rare. In Montaillou and neighboring villages, people only take the communion once or at most twice a year, on Easter and maybe on one other major holiday (probably All Saints which is bigger than Christmas).
  • It’s interesting how taking communion became much more frequent through history. In medieval Occitania, it was once per year. In a mid-20th century English novel I read, it was every one or two months, on major feast days, even for the most devout characters. Pew says that among US Catholics today, 66% of regular church-goers take communion every week. I wonder what caused this trend.

• Saints, especially the Virgin Mary are really important for Catholics. My impression is that the Virgin Mary is maybe worshipped a little more than God Himself.

  • Even the unbelievers take her seriously. Someone scoffing at all religions says: “I’m telling you, God and the Virgin Mary are just the visible world around us.” This is the most unique take on pantheism I’ve ever heard.

• There are a lot of (maybe 10%) people who are more or less atheists, and believe that there is no afterlife, the material body is all there is, and the world has existed since forever and will exist forever.

• Overall, I wonder how a well-meaning 1300s Catholic bishop would feel, how the state of Christianity today compares to that of his own century. The printing press caused a big upheaval, half of Europe converted to Protestantism, later much of the world entirely lost their faith. But at least the remaining Catholics today seem to be better informed and in many ways better followers of their religion than the average peasant in 1300. I think it’s plausible that the end result is still better from the perspective of a well-meaning bishop.

The Inquisition

• The Inquisition in the book is less terrible than what you’d expect from pop culture portrayals. But I think that “the Inquisition usually had pretty high standards of evidence and was more reasonable than pop culture suggests” is already a well-known take at this point. So I think the more important take-away for me was that yes, religious persecution was still very bad in an absolute sense and I’m glad we stopped doing it.

• The book writes surprisingly little about how the Inquisition worked, but I will write what I pieced together from the book and from reading some of the original records (translated to English) online.

• First, people get questioned about their religious beliefs, and about whether they have helped to hide the Cathar parfaits or if they have ever assisted to a dying person being hereticated. People are also asked to testify against each other, and then people get confronted with the accusations that their neighbors brought against them.

• Some people don’t really have accusations against them and their questioning reveals them to be a mostly orthodox Catholic. Sometimes they are genuinely confused about the Church’s teaching about something (for example they say that wolves were created by Satan instead of God). In this case, the inquisitor corrects them, and if they apologize, the Inquisition is very forgiving of this type of mistake. In this case, they get released without punishment.

• If they had a little too much involvement with the Cathars, but they confess it and promise to change their ways, they are often released but are required to wear a shameful yellow cross on their clothes for a few years to show that they were heretics.

  • There is at least one instance of someone not wearing his yellow cross regularly and being put in prison for six years for it.

• Another common pattern is that someone gets confronted by accusations that their neighbors said they were saying various heretical things or aided the parfaits. In the records I read, people usually first deny the charges. Then they are led back to prison, and usually by the second or third questioning they confess. The book claims that this almost never involved torture, only solitary confinement. I didn’t find an example of someone sticking to their guns and consistently denying the accusations; I don’t know what would have happened to them.

  • These people, who were serious heretics, and first tried to lie but later confessed, usually get sentenced to prison. The prison terms I’ve seen usually ranged from one to six years.
  • As far as I can tell, the majority of jailed people survived prison, even the six year long sentences. This surprised me, I would have expected medieval prisons to be so un-sanitary that few survived long sentences.
  • I was also surprised to see imprisonment so commonly used as a punishment. I was under the impression that prison is an expensive form of punishment, so it’s a relatively recent invention to sentence common criminals to long prison sentences, and older cultures used fines and capital and corporal punishment. But apparently no, the Inquisition had long-term prisons for heretical peasants.

• Heretics also often have their land confiscated and their house torn down. People mention being afraid of their house being torn down surprisingly often compared to being afraid of imprisonment.

• As far as I can tell, the Inquisition barely uses torture and corporal punishment in the book. There is one gruesome story though: at some point, some years prior to the whole village getting arrested, Pierre Clergue got his friends in the Inquisition to arrest a woman who was speaking out against him, and the woman got her tongue torn out. I couldn’t learn much about this incident other than that it increased Clergue’s hold over the villagers, until finally the Inquisition arrested him too.

• As far as I can tell, there were maybe two or three people from Montaillou who got executed by the Inquisition. I found the records on one of them. I’m not even sure he was actually a Cathar, but when the Inquisition asked him to swear an oath about something, he refused. He explained that he heard that God didn’t approve of people swearing oaths. He clarified that he didn’t believe that it was a very serious sin, and he thought God wouldn’t send people to Hell for it, but he still didn’t want to do something that God didn’t approve of. The Inquisition practically begged him to recant this belief and swear the oath; they tried to convince him through many days, but he persisted. Eventually, he was handed over to the secular authorities to be burnt at the stake.

  • Presumably, he indirectly got the idea that oaths were forbidden from Matthew 5:33-37. But he never referred to the Bible, he always just said that he heard from someone that God was against oaths. I can’t help but admire this man’s bravery, but I also find it kind of shocking that he was willing to die for this belief without even knowing its source.

Closing thoughts

Montaillou has achieved unexpected popularity among lay people, even though it was originally written as an academic book. I’m not sure if this popularity is entirely well-deserved - I think if a lay person wants to learn about the life of medieval peasants, they are better served reading a more general account (for example this blog post series on ACOUP) than reading this book describing some aspects of life in one, many ways unrepresentative, Occitan village.

But the general accounts are built from historians reading accounts of particular bits and pieces of the big picture, and the records from Montaillou are one very interesting piece to build from.