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Kill them all!: An alternate cathar war
Chapter 1: It all started in the Balkans...
Its from the east that came the disease who eat away the ranks of the faithfull of Provencia.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, 1145 Not content to give their hearts to the foul greek heresy the servants of Satan in the east have conspired to infect the souls of the remaining true faithfull.
Pierre des Vaux de Cernaux in his Historia Albigensis, 1215 It is from the lands of the Bulgars that the consolament, gift of the apostoles to the true faithfull, came to us
Bernard Marty, Cathar Bishop of the Laurageais, 1220
It all started in the Balkans. An extremely strange way to start an history of the war that raged in the Algensian country during the first years of the 13th century that sentence might seem to be but not less true. In 950 the Czar of Bulgaria sent a letter to the Orthodoxt Patriarch of Constantinople, warning him of the success of wandering predicator named Bogomil. According to Bogomil there was not one creation but two, one good and spiritual, created by a good of love where the souls of the truly free roamed and one material created by Satan, where the souls where trapped in their bodies and condemned to reincarnation. And so was founded the religious doctrine today know as dualism. In the decades who followed the letter of the Czar the faith of Bogomil won many followers, especially among the common folks, and organised itself as a counter church.
It must be said that Bogomil had more then a few advantages when came the time to preach to the common: the ascetism of its priests contrasted with the opulence of the orthodox clergy and the simplicity of a doctrine who resolved the possible contradictions between ancient and new testament by simply refusing to recognise the first and had only one sacrement (the consolament, necessary to make one a priest and the only way to allow one souls to escape reincarnation) sat well with a population who understand nothing of the debates on the nature of Transubstation and other theological conondrum who agitated the church of Constantinople. Not even the ferocious repression ordonned by the Byzantime emperor Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer after its conquest managed to held the tide of Bogomil church. After the reasumption of Bulgarian indepedance the Czar of the House of Assen protected the Bogomilits, finding them a usefull fool when came the time to assert their independance from the Byzantine patriarch of Constantinople. Nevertheless, it was in the small states of Dioclée and Tum (1) that the dualist destiny had its most resounding successes. Wanting to assert its independance from both catholic Hungary and Orthodox Byzantium, the Bosnian prince Koulime converted himself to dualism, bringing the local populations with him. Numerous punitive expeditions by the hungarians failed to deprive dualism from its status as the state religion of Dioclée and Tum. There, like in Bulgaria, it survived in relative good shape until the turkish conquest.
By one the ironies of witch history has the secret it was the Oriental crusades who brought dualism in the west. Closer links between the Balkans and Western Europe brought commercial exchanges and with commercial exchanges also came exchanges of ideas and with spice and gold also came dualism. The first two centuries of the second millenium saw dualists sects came into existence all across western Europe. The first pire, light in Orléans in 1020, was followed by dozens. The anti-heretics mesure agreed upon in the Synode of Arras in 1225 where used against dualists in Northern France, Aquitaine, England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and in the Low Countries during the following 200 years. In the last region the organisation of the local dualist sect, the Tisserands, in a counter church was deemed serious enough to provoke the unleashing of a sort of proto inquisition through 1144. Nevertheless, the successes of the western dualists paled in comparion with those of their balkanic breathen. The repression was both ferocious and efficients, assisted by willing secular powers and by a population who sometime needed to be restrain to avoid the lynching of those heretics on witch the catholic church had decided to bestow her pardon. In all the west, that is, with the exception of the Languedoc.