Provence

Provence and the wider Occitan-speaking south of France held, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the best organised religious dissent in western Europe before the Reformation. Its adherents were called Cathars by their opponents and known locally as good men and good women; they held a dualist theology in which the visible world is the work of an evil power and the soul belongs elsewhere, rejected the Catholic sacraments, and centred their practice on a single rite of laying on of hands administered near death or on entry into full membership.

How coherent the movement actually was is now genuinely contested. One line of scholarship treats it as an organised church with bishops and a transmitted eastern dualism; another argues that the coherence is largely an artefact of the records, which were produced by inquisitors working from a template of what heresy was supposed to look like.

What is not in doubt is the response. In 1209 a crusade was preached against Christians in Christian territory, an innovation in itself, and twenty years of war followed that destroyed the political independence of the Occitan south and attached it to the French crown. The inquisitorial procedure developed to find survivors afterwards became the model for later institutions of the same kind, so the campaign shaped the machinery of the western church well beyond the region.

Two very different things happened in this region within about a century and a half of each other, and both are consequential far beyond it.

The first is the papacy's residence at Avignon. From 1309 to 1377 the popes lived not in Rome but on the Rhone, in a fortified palace that still stands, under heavy French influence. The period is conventionally called the Babylonian captivity by its critics, and it produced a large and efficient papal bureaucracy, a great deal of resentment about taxation, and, when it ended badly, the schism of 1378, in which rival popes at Rome and Avignon excommunicated one another and Europe divided along political lines for nearly forty years. The conciliar movement, which argued that a general council outranks a pope, came directly out of the effort to end it.

The second is textual. The Sefer ha-Bahir, the earliest work of what became kabbalah, appears in circulation in this region in the later twelfth century, and the circle around Isaac the Blind in Provence is the first identifiable group teaching the doctrine of the divine emanations. Gershom Scholem's reconstruction of these beginnings placed the movement's emergence here before its development in Catalonia and, much later, in Safed. The region's Jewish community was also a major centre of philosophical translation from Arabic into Hebrew.