Romantic and ruined, the medieval fortresses which range in a broad arc around Carcassonne have come to be known as the Cathar castles , though in fact many of the castles in question were built after the Cathars' demise. The Cathars
were a sect strong in this part of France, who were proscribed as
heretics by Pope Innocent III. With papal blessing and the connivance
of the French kings, hungry northern nobles descended on the area in a
series of Albigensian crusades, beginning in 1208 and led for many
years by the notoriously cruel Simon de Montfort. The name of the sect
derives from the Greek word for "clean, pure", katharos , and
they abhorred the materialism and worldly power of the established
Church, proclaiming the simple and humble Christianity of the Sermon on
the Mount. Although their adherents probably never accounted for more
than ten percent of the population, there were many members of the
nobility and the influential classes among them, which alarmed the
powers that be.
Cathars who were caught were burnt in communal
conflagrations, 100 or 200 at a time. Their lands were laid waste or
seized by the northern nobles, de Montfort himself grabbing the
properties of the count of Toulouse. The effect of this brutality was
to unite both the Cathars and their Catholic neighbours in southern
solidarity against the barbarian north. Though military defeat became
irreversible with the capitulation of Toulouse in 1229 and the fall of
the castle of Montségur in 1244, it took the informers and torturers of
the Holy Inquisition another seventy years to root out Cathars
completely.
The best of the castles are in the arid, herb-scented hills of the Corbières to the south of Carcassonne. Walking is undoubtedly the most direct way to experience them, and there are numerous paths, of which the GR36
, crossing from Carcassonne to St-Paul-de-Fenouillet, and the Sentier
Cathare, crossing east to west from Port La-Nouvelle to Foix, are the
most exciting. The Sentier Cathare is pided into twelve stages with gîtes d'étape , described in Sentier Cathare Topoguide (Rando Editions), available in local bookstores.
Without transport or walking boots, the best way to
tackle them is from the south, as the most spectacular ones are close
to the Perpignan-Quillan road, which has a bus
service. With transport it becomes possible to explore the wilder back
roads and utterly ruinous castles like Durfort and Termes, and to cross
the cols where orchids and cowslips shudder in the spring winds and the
views southward all end in the snowy Pyrenean bulk of Canigou.
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