[BRIEF NOTE] What alternate history would I like to see?

[rfmcdonald]

The shwiers livejournal community still exists. I say this because I think that it's a useful sort of forum to have on Livejournal for aficionados of alternate histories, as dryaunda demonstrated with his recent post asking what sorts of original alternate histories which don't center upon Nazi or Confederate war victories people could think of.

Myself, I'd like to consider whether or not the Cathars had a chance of surviving. A Manichaean sect concentrated in southern France, they were described more-or-less accurately by the early 14th century Inquisitor Bernard Gui (at the Internet Medieval Source Book) as follows.

In the first place, they usually say of themselves that they are good Christians, who do not swear, or lie, or speak evil of others; that they do not kill any man or animal, nor anything having the breath of life, and that they hold the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ and his gospel as the apostles taught. They assert that they occupy the place of the apostles, and that, on account of the above-mentioned things, they of the Roman Church, namely the prelates, clerks, and monks, and especially the inquisitors of heresy persecute them and call them heretics, although they are good men and good Christians, and that they are persecuted just as Christ and his apostles were by the Pharisees.

Moreover they talk to the laity of the evil lives of the clerks and prelates of the Roman Church, pointing out and setting forth their pride, cupidity, avarice, and uncleanness of life, and such other evils as they know. They invoke with their own interpretation and according to their abilities the authority of the Gospels and the Epistles against the condition of the prelates, churchmen, and monks, whom they call Pharisees and false prophets, who say, but do no.

Then they attack and vituperate, in turn, all the sacraments of the Church, especially the sacrament of the eucharist, saying that it cannot contain the body of Christ, for had this been as great as the largest mountain Christians would have entirely consumed it before this. They assert that the host comes from straw, that it passes through the tails of horses, to wit, when the flour is cleaned by a sieve (of horse hair); that, moreover, it passes through the body and comes to a vile end, which, they say, could not happen if God were in it.

Of baptism, they assert that the water is material and corruptible and is therefore the creation of the evil power, and cannot sanctify the soul, but that the churchmen sell this water out of avarice, just as they sell earth for the burial of the dead, and oil to the sick when they anoint them, and as: they sell the confession of sins as made to the priests.

Hence they claim that confession made to the priests of, the Roman Church is useless, and that, since the priests may be sinners, they cannot loose nor bind, and, being unclean in themselves, cannot make others clean. They assert, moreover, that the cross of Christ should not be adored or venerated, because, as they urge, no one would venerate or adore the gallows upon which a father, relative, or friend had been hung. They urge, further, that they who adore the cross ought, for similar reasons, to worship all thorns and lances, because as Christ's body was on the cross during the passion, so was the crown of thorns on his head and the soldier's lance in his side, They proclaim many other scandalous things in regard to the sacraments.

Moreover they read from the Gospels and the Epistles in the vulgar tongue, applying and expounding them in their favor and against the condition of the Roman Church in a manner which it would take too long to describe in detail; but all that relates to this subject may be read more fully in the books they have written and infected, and may be learned from the confessions of such of their followers as have been converted.

The Cathar faith was annihilated in the early 13th century, initial peaceful efforts to persuade the proto-Occitans to abjure their heretics giving way to the Albigensian Crusade, which, among other things, led to the creation of the Inquisition and gave birth to the immortal phrase "Kill them all. God will know His own." (Allegedly, a bishop and papal legate gave this order at the sack of Béziers, It's not known for certain whether or not he actually said that, but it is true that Béziers' population was slaughtered.)

Absent a wholesale breakdown of the ecumenical Church of the medieval West, it may be impossible to keep the Cathars from being forcibly reintegrated into the religious community of Europe. If they could resist, though, the consequences would be interesting, and not only in the domain of religion. One method used by the Cathars to resist religious centralization was to insist on their right to maintain their traditional autonomy. Aragon's King Peter II of Aragon died in 1213 at the battle of Muret in defense of this principle. Given the Cathars' preference for vernacular literature, this history would be one where the Occitan language would develop uninterrupted into a modern language, perhaps as part of a Occitano-Catalan space straddling the Pyrenees.