A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Pivotal Moments in World History)

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 288 pages
• Published by: Oxford University Press, USA January 28, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0195171314
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0195171310
• Book Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1.3 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When a papal legate was murdered in southern France in 1208, Pope Innocent III's reaction was swift and harsh. Convinced that the villages between Montpelier and Bordeaux were hideouts for heretics and accusing the count of Toulouse of protecting them, the pope issued his now famous plea for all knights and barons to be signed with the cross and to drive out all heretics in a great crusade. The Albigensian Crusade was the only one of the medieval crusades to pit Christian against Christian. In this lively and fast-paced inaugural book in Oxford's Pivotal Moments in World History series, Pegg grippingly retells the story of a crusade built on legend, not truth. The pope preached to his armies that whoever slaughtered these alleged heretics would not only cleanse his own soul but the soul of Christendom as well. This crusade, as Pegg remarkably demonstrates, introduced genocide into the world and paved the way for Christians to engage in the inquisitions against Jews and the crusades against Muslims that marked the remainder of the Middle Ages. Drawing on numerous primary documents, Pegg's compelling history offers fresh glimpses into the nature of religious violence as well as the easy ways that religions often fall into intolerance. (Feb.)
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Product Review

"Mark Gregory Pegg's A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom is a pathbreaking, iconoclastic account of the crusade that was mounted in 1209 to eliminate heresy from the French region of Provence. it breaks new ground rather than synopsizing what is already known."--Austin American Statesman
"Pegg's is a wonderfully articulate, exciting, and very risky book. He boldly redraws the late twelfth-century political and devotional map of Provence and the Toulousain, identified as hotbeds of heresy in Cistercian rhetoric, and he meticulously plots the actions of the Cistercian-inspired Pope Innocent III and the armies he threw for two decades against the 'good men,' 'good women,' and quarreling nobles of the region. Pegg knows the landscape well, and his accounts of military enterprise are meticulous and vivid, his characters distinctive, and his final reflections on genocide offer ominous implications not only for the religious uses of coercion in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe, but for later times as well."--Ed Peters, University of Pennsylvania
"Mark Pegg's A Most Holy War is a bold, erudite, engaging, and superbly written study of what has long been one of the most central topics in medieval and Mediterranean history. By providing a vivid and detailed portrait of the Albigensian crusade and of the great trail of blood the crusaders left in their wake, Pegg offers to his readers a brilliant and lasting contribution to our understanding of one of the harshest and most critical moments in the history of the West."--Teofilo F. Ruiz, Professor of History, UCLA
"I can think of no topic in medieval history that makes such demands on the skills of the historian as the terrible and momentous tragedy of the Albigensian crusade. Mark Pegg's extraordinary achievement lies not so much in his rare command of the materials and the problems that surround them as the grace with which he embraces them in a flowing, deeply moving and gorgeously written narrative. This is the first modern account that is worthy of the subject."--Robert Moore, Professor Emeritus, Medieval History, University of Newcastle upon Tyne and author of The Formation of a Persecuting Society


Reader Reviews
Mark Gregory Pegg has written an excellent history of an episode that is often neglected in crusade polemics- the Albigensian Crusade. "A Most Holy War" was released on January 14, 2008, the 800th anniversary of the event that precipitated the crusade, the murder of a Papal Legate in Toulouse, France. Pope Innocent III was furious, and became convinced that the whole area was swarming with heretics, and that the Count of Toulouse, Raimon VI, was protecting them. The only way that the Count could exonerate himself from this charge was to "expel the followers of heresy from the whole of his dominion." Until then, the Pope said, "all those signed with the cross, the crucesignati, `in the name of the God of peace and love' and with `our promise of remission of sins,' must strenuously `root out perfidious heresy' and purify the land. `Attack the followers of heresy more fearlessly than even the Saracens,' was Innocent III's thundering conclusion, `since heretics are more evil!'" (p. 7) This obsession with heresy did not happen in a vacuum. Pegg gives a brief background of a new obsession with heresy that started in the 11th century. With a widespread belief in the end of days, there arose an eschatological vision that saw all heretics as linked in time and space. Of course, the concept of heresy hardly arose in the Middle Ages (see "There is No Crime For Those Who Have Christ"), but in the 11th century it took on a new apocalyptic significance. In the Toulouse area, there was a distinctive Christian sub-culture that, among other things, rejected the bodily resurrection, original sin, and baptismal regeneration. These people were seen as a plague that threatened Christendom, and so there was a moral obligation, according to the Pope and his crusaders, for mass murder. Pegg shows how a fanatical insistence on purity of thought and doctrine led to a turning point in history, that helped to usher mass slaughter for the sake of purity (genocide) into Western thought. "The most holy war is a story of grand expeditions, heroic sieges, village insurgents, kings trampled to death, children set on fire, heaven and earth remade- it is the epic story of the battle for Christendom." (xiv) Pegg's work is essential for anyone wanting a work on a forgotten crusade, which pitted Christian against Christian.