Books & Bibles
Entertainment
Fashion & Jewelry
Gifts & Giving
Home Decor & Accents
Kitchen & Gourmet
Beauty & Health
Specialty Stores
|
|
|
|
|
A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Pivotal Moments in World History)
| Our Price |
$ 18.50
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Item Number |
708322 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Item Description...
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.
At GoodNews Christian Bookstore, we have possibly the lowest prices anywhere! Discount on books and bibles is 25%. Checkout our church supplies page! We are cheaper than Lifeway and Family Christian. Shop with confidence! Blessings, Bill |
Item Specifications...
Pages 288
Dimensions: Length: 8.8" Width: 5.7" Height: 1.1"
Weight: 0.95 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Publisher Oxford University Press
ISBN 0195393104
EAN 9780195393101
|
Availability 100 units.
Availability accurate as of May 26, 2012 03:50.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
Orders shipping to an address other than a confirmed Credit Card / Paypal Billing address may incur and additional processing delay.
|
Product Categories
Similar Products
Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | A Salvific Genocidal Imperative? Oct 13, 2009 |
In the battle for Christendom as depicted by Professor Mark Gregory Pegg in "A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom," the good guys lost and evil prevailed.
At the beginning and end of this book, Pegg asserts that the Albigensian Crusade "ushered genocide into the West" (pp. xiv and 188) by mass murder of heretics usually called Cathars or Albigensians (though Pegg disputes this wording - he calls them "good men" -- and he rejects the traditional notion of their heresy). For Pegg, instances of extermination of populations in the West previous to the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) don't constitute genocide because they don't conform to his idiosyncratic definition of genocide (pp. 188 and 189), which he concludes by saying, "[t]his is a definition of genocide; this is a definition of the Albigensian Crusade" (p. 189). He identifies genocide as having specifically what he regards as the characteristics of the Albigensian crusade. To Pegg, "as horrific as is any bloodshed," genocide, with all of that term's loaded emotive content, is in its roots a creation of the Albigensian Crusade, which would make it largely, if not entirely, the responsibility of the 13th century Roman Catholic Church.
So exclusive is Pegg's definition of genocide that by his requirements, genocide probably never occurred. To qualify as genocide by Pegg's standards, just for one thing, "in the activity of causing widespread death, individuals [perpetrating genocide] ... actually become the godhead themselves" (page 189), meaning that an act of mass murder might be classified as genocide when the killers believe themselves to be deified by the murder they commit. This badly strains credulity. Pegg claims on page 161 that the primary Albigensian crusader general, Simon of Montfort, was a repository of inner "strenuous molding of the divine and the human," but there is no statement backed by references demonstrating that Simon and other crusaders thought themselves to be divinized. (Such is Pegg's imagination that he sees Simon's spiritual development, which the professor asserts but does not substantiate, as the prototype of the "holy stigmata of Francis of Assisi" {p. 161}, though given Pegg's ironic use of the word, "holy," he probably means that the stigmata was evil.)
Contrary to some commentators, including the writer of the Oxford Universtiy Press description of this book, Pegg does not refer to anti-Semitism. On page190 the author confusingly indicates that anti-semiticism (not anti-Semitism) is anti-Judaism, and he says that "[a]nti-semiticism [meaning anti-Judaism] in the Middle Ages only occurred after the Albigensian Crusade." In fact, anti-Judaism (anti-semiticism) was practiced by the "good men" (Cathars) in their rejection of the Old Testament (pp.48-49) before the crusade. (On page 49 Pegg claims that Jesus of Nazareth shared the Cathars' rejection of the Old Testament. For an exposition of Christ's numerous devout references to the Old Testament, see [...].) This point bears attention because given Pegg's charge that the Albigensian crusaders initiated genocide, the further allegation that they were responsible for anti-semiticism might lead one who takes Pegg seriously to blame the Albigensian crusaders for all persecution of Jews subsequent to the crusade, including the Holocaust.
Pegg calls the Albigensian Crusade "a series of armed pilgrimages in which Christians were guaranteed salvation through the killing of other Christians" (p. 5). The killers to whom Pegg refers had no "guarantee" of salvation. It is true that, as Pegg observes, indulgences were used (or abused) to motivate participation in the Albigensian Crusade, and under proper circumstances one could achieve the promise of remission of sins and removal of punishment for them by means of indulgence. However, as Jonathan Riley-Smith notes in "The Crusades," p. 167, "[Pope] Innocent abolished most of the indulgences for the Albigensian Crusade early in 1213 in favour of his plans for a new crusade to the East." Further, if one who is granted an indulgence goes off to engage in the same dishonest, drunken, lascivious, murderous, or thieving behavior as before the indulgence, in conformity with Catholic teaching he would know that he is again in a state of sin for which he should be punished if he doesn't properly repent, and the indulgence previously earned would not help at all. Indulgences in the Albigensian Crusade were very limited, and were never a guarantee of salvation.
Pegg declares that in the Albigensian Crusade there was a "moral obligation for mass murder" (p. xiv), an "irrevocable obligation to mass murder" (p.78), and a "linking [of] salvation to mass murder" (p. 188), meaning that Catholics put their souls in mortal danger if they did not murder heretics and their enablers on a mass scale. Actually, this is not evident from expressed Catholic moral law, or from magisterium teaching, or from the behavior of the Catholic population of Europe during the years of the Albigensian Crusade. To refrain from violently combating spiritual dangers such as heresy does not violate the ten commandments or the seven deadly sins, and as far as I know, though Popes Innocent III and Honorius III exhorted men to join the Albigensian Crusade, they did not tell them that they would be eternally damned or even temporally punished in the afterlife if they refused. Also, many devout Catholics, somehow impervious to the salvific genocidal imperative, not only did not murder heretics but cooperated with them in resisting the crusade armies of Simon of Montfort and his son and successor, Amaury, which would indicate that there was no permeation of 13th century Catholic society with genocidal fanaticism against the heretics. Furthermore, Pegg himself notes that the Montfortians had trouble maintaining armies (pp. 91, 98, 105, 119, 172) and that they had to rely on mercenaries (pp. 98 and 158). One would think that people endeavoring to avoid moral perdition by murdering heretics, as Pegg indicates, would have voluntarily fought en masse continuously until the heretics were entirely exterminated, but maybe there just wasn't a moral obligation for Catholics to murder heretics.
Pegg sees the Albigensian Crusade as being inspired by the linking of "annihilating bloodshed with the redemptive gift of being like Him [Jesus Christ]" (p. 148). Imitation of Christ is given much emphasis by Pegg . In fact, he provided a category for this topic in the index which I used to review what I might have missed to explain how Pegg figures that imitation of Christ, who never armed Himself, and who ordered a sword raised in His defense to be put down, was a stimulus to mass murder. Encouragement to imitate Christ that I am familiar with, for example, by St. Francis of Assisi and St. John of the Cross, stresses that we should imitate the humility and obedience of Christ. I've never seen a call to kill people in imitation of Christ, and Pegg doesn't demonstrate that he has either.
Pegg proclaims on page 188 that the Albigensian Crusade made "slaughter as loving an act as His [Christ's] sacrifice on the cross." One who perseveres through the whole book is not surprised by this kind of crack, but that such a statement comes from a reputable history professor and is printed by a reputable university press would suggest that no hostile remark about orthodox Christianity is so ridiculous as to cause any loss of reputation in academe.
A most "holy" war? Eminent historians of the crusades have pointed out the non-religious side of the Albigensian Crusade. One, Austin P. Evans, wrote, "The real antecedents of the Albigensian crusade lay far back in the economic, political, cultural, and religious history of southern France" (p. 278, "A History of the Crusades," Vol. II, Wolf and Hazard, editors). Another, Christopher Tyerman, wrote that the "aims [of the Albingensian Crusade] revolved around a series of essentially secular objectives" ("God's War," p.594).
Whatever may be the extent to which the Albigensian Crusade was a secular rather than a "holy" war, the Albigensian crusaders did not invent genocide, they did not create anti-Semitism or anti-semiticism, mass murder is not a feature of the Christian moral code, Christ is not a model for murder, and we can do without Pegg's loose cannonades in trying to understand historical and contemporary events.
| | | | Scholarship for Dummies Jun 1, 2009 |
This type of book is consistent with a particularly academic worldview. That is to say everything can be explained within a narrow paradigm. Ergo: historical conflicts, even genocides, are simply the manifestation of one side's fear of the unknown which is represented by the other side. This explains why the insecure Romans sought to eradicate the 'heretics' in medieval Languedoc. It's Psychology 101.
Rome hunted down these particular 'heretics' to every last woman and child. They killed thousands of orthodox Catholics who were known or suspected to have associated with the 'heretics.' So it is more probable that Cathars were exterminated because of what they knew, not because of how they looked, dressed, spoke, or behaved. They had to be killed. They had the power to destroy Catholicism. And methinks the Cathars had the ability to do a lot more than that.
Oxford/Harvard historians will never research this. Far too much to lose. It will be left to amateurs, who can be easily dismissed. In other words, we will have to wait a long time for the truth. | | |  | Good question taken too far Feb 19, 2009 |
In a controversial account of the Albigensian Crusade and the history of the most infamous of Medieval Heretics, the Cathars, Mark Pegg scathingly emends hundreds of years of scholarship and asserts that the underground, yet systematized, heterodoxy in fact never existed. Pegg repeatedly attacks his predecessors for their reliance upon sources he deems not only suspect but also downright deceptive and spurious. While his scholarship is strong, though not above reproach, the vitriol he hurls at his dissenters clouds his arguments and brings his motives into question.
The book begins with his emotional encounter at Montségur in 1995 with a pilgrim seeking a mystical connection to the supposed heretics. This experience as well as another three years later with a man who despised the Cathars, are the lead in to Pegg's desired goals: for the former he "attempted to write a history more poignant and moving than the most romantic of myths," and for the latter "to offer an account more penetrating and decisive than blunt opinions... allow (xiv)."
This revisionist hypothesis of a fictitious Cathar heresy is founded upon three characteristics of the day: the belief in the imminent apocalypse which demanded an increased presence of heresy, the fusion of deviant behavior and heretical beliefs, and a domineering pope with a doctrinal claim to an authority which superceded the temporal powers of the day. Pegg intertwines these rather seamlessly. He argues that the pervasive "chiliastic" apocalypticism required "an evil abundance of heretics... having long flourished in secret (10)." Millennial eschatology prompted a diligent search for these heretics theologically known to exist. Suspicion fell upon those who "perverted customs and dress (14)" as well as those who would not conform to Innocent III's vision of uniform Christianity. The medley of a prophesied, portentous event and panic regarding indiscernible apostates in the area between the Garonne and Rhône Rivers triggered a Holy War declared by the "greatest pope of the Middle Ages and one of the most important individuals in the history of Christianity (148)," to purge the land of them.
The author dismisses any notion of an organized sub-church as propaganda and a form of revisionist history itself. He utilizes numerous sources immediately preceding the, subsequently labeled, Albigensian Crusade as well as chronicles and troubadour songs from the early years, none of which refer to structured, institutionalized alternative Christian culture. Instead, these contemporary witnesses address pernicious preachers, and their unidentified followers and supporters, giving an external appearance of piety. However, despite the absence of a stated creed, unlike the Waldensians, whose founder had affirmed his orthodoxy (although not his orthopraxy) and even "After twelve years of the crusade... were still not considered heretics in Avignonet (171)," the Catholic hierarchy began to attribute dualist beliefs to the "bon ome" or "good men (26)." Still, Pegg attacks these dictums as attempts to conjoin the present threat with those of the past, specifically Manichaeism and Gnosticism. Further, he convincingly discredits the principal document utilized by his antagonists. The "Charter of Niquinta," published in 1652 by Guillaume Besse, has been the source for Cathar scholars. However, Pegg reveals that only Besse ever saw the original. Pegg describes any historical claim based on this document "absurd" and "embarrassing (170." His argument is strong, but his language does endear many to him.
Pegg's style is narrative and anecdotal allowing the reader to become engrossed in the story. However, his propensity to weave document excerpts in and out of his own ideas is disorienting. In addition, his method of citing these references is convoluted. For example during the recounting of the Crusaders' attack of Béziers, he quotes the attitude of the looters as "Rich for all time, if they can keep it (76)." However, the next footnote is three separate quotations and eleven lines later. The gaps force the reader to forage for Pegg's sources; thus, their engagement is severed and must be revivified. These stylistic deficiencies are bothersome, but due to the saga's human drama and his zeal for the material, they are far from insurmountable. Pegg's work is an exciting read and will spark reflection on the origin of genocide in the West; for, if his thesis is correct, a twenty-year massacre occurred based upon the false premise of an enemy within. While it is good for discussion, his assertion that the Albigensian Crusade ushered in genocide to the West is a bit overblown. He forgets the massacre of the Jews in the Rhineland during earlier crusades, and he forgets that the sacking of Constantinople was another example of Christian on Christian violence. Of course, it can be agreed that whether doctrinal disagreement exists or not, the systematic annihilation of a group of people should be condemned in any age.
| | | | Evil versus Evil. Jan 25, 2009 |
This informative and painfully insightful history of the persecution of one brand of Christianity by another brand of Christianity is certainly interesting, in the same way that any crime story is interesting.
But it is a crime story. The problem I see is that Mark Pegg seems not to understand who the criminals were and who the victims are. Although he reveals (largely through the words and records of their murderers and persecutors) that the more simple, non-papal, Albigensian Christians were known as bon home or "good men" to their neighbors and persecutors alike, his book minimizes their devotion and dedication. He seems to think that they were just different because their Provencal society had social needs and conventions that created them. And golly gee, didn't that get them into a pack of trouble! Why they could be faithful, by the thousands, unto death against the assembled might of arms, rulers, and pope for such a vapid and superficial faith, is never even hinted at by Pegg.
Likewise the Papal persecutors are presented as just good old Christians doing terrible things. The Catholic hagiography inspired by or invented to justify this bloody persecution is recounted mostly non-critically. And although clearly Pegg is critical of mass murders, ethnic cleansing, and religious intollerance, this is presented as a Christian problem, one that excessive love of Christ even worsens!
Trying to explain evil from a limited humanistic or modernistic viewpoint, is like trying to explain what happened at Hiroshima by carefully analysis of the chemical makeup of the bomb or the flight characteristics of the Enola Gay. While such a narrow focus may be perfectly true, it will not tell you the Truth.
This Christian crime story is not comprehensible outside of the broader context of a fallen Roman church with a corrupt and corrupting hierarchy, in unholy alliance with equally corrupt political powers, wealth, and pomp. The fact that this unholy power combination dares use the name of Christian against a grass roots attempt in Provencal to return to a more authentic, apostolic, and true version of Christianity is the real crime behind the multiple crimes of this story.
Read this book for information, but not for understanding. Besides telling of Cathar, Albigensian, Waldensian victims, Christianity and Christ Himself are victimized by Pegg's narrow analysis.
| | |  | Realistic, thoughtful history of a 13th century crusade in S France. Dec 24, 2008 |
| I very much enjoyed this book. I particularly appreciated being allowed to see the personal views of being a historian at the beginning to be considered while reading this well supported and detailed account of a turbulent period of history that provided the frame for a detached and sobering analysis and message for today at the end. | | | Write your own review about A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Pivotal Moments in World History)
|
Shopping Cart (0 Items)
