power to claim for the coercion of
souls the material force of the temporal powers, and its right to strip
temporal sovereigns, in case they set at nought its injunctions, of their
title to the obedience of their people; in other words, denial of
religious liberty to conscience and of political independence to states.
It was by virtue of these two principles, at that time dominant, but not
without some opposition, in Christendom, that Innocent III., in 1208,
summoned the King of France, the great lords and the knights, and the
clergy, secular and regular, of the kingdom to assume the cross and go
forth to extirpate from Southern France the Albigensians, "worse than the
Saracens;" and that he promised to the chiefs of the crusaders the
sovereignty of such domains as they should win by conquest from the
princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics.

Throughout all France, and even outside of France, the passions of
religion and ambition were aroused at this summons.

Twelve abbots and twenty monks of Citeaux dispersed themselves in all
directions preaching the crusade; and lords and knights, burghers and
peasants, laymen and clergy, hastened to respond. "From near and far
they came," says the contemporary poet-chronicler, William of Tudela;
"there be men from Auvergne and Burgundy, France and Limousin; there be
men from all the world; there be Germans, Poitevines, Gascons, Rouergats,
and Saintongese. Never did God make scribe who, whatsoever his pains,
could set them all down in writing, in two months or in three." The poet
reckons "twenty thousand horsemen armed at all points, and more than two
hundred thousand villeins and peasants, not to speak of burghers and
clergy." A less exaggerative though more fanatical writer, Peter of
Vaulx-Cernay, the chief contemporary chronicler of this crusade, contents
himself with saying that, at the siege of Carcassonne, one of the first
operations of the crusaders, "it was said that their army numbered fifty
thousand men." Whatever may be the truth about the numbers, the
crusaders were passionately ardent and persevering: the war against the
Albigensians lasted fifteen years (from 1208 to 1223), and of the two
leading spirits, one ordering and the other executing, Pope Innocent III.
and Simon de Montfort, neither saw the end of it. During these fifteen
years, in the region situated between the Rhone, the Pyrenees, the
Garonne, and even the Dordogne, nearly all the towns a