‘The root of bitterness’: Crusade and the Eradication of Heresy from the Occitanian Landscape in Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay’s Historia Albigensis

When Pope Innocent III wrote to the archbishops of the south of France in a letter dated 10 March 1208, he famously employed the metaphor of the Lord’s vineyard, wherein tares (heretics) threatened the integrity of the entire crop (the community of Christian souls). A decade later, Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, who dedicated his account of the resulting Albigensian Crusade to Innocent, would frame his account in terms of the control and cleansing of the spiritual and physical landscapes of the Languedoc. According to Peter, ‘the South’ was infected and in need of purgation, just like the souls of the supposed heretics who thrived there. Peter’s engagement with the real and imagined landscapes of Occitania ranges from the metaphorical—a way to convey the nature of the perceived threat of heresy—to the literal—a way to convey the achievement of the crusaders in besieging the formidably positioned castra of the region. While the distinction between spiritual and physical landscapes in Peter’s Historia Albigensis should not be overstated, this essay examines these aspects in turn to reveal how Peter crafted a narrative of a multivalent landscape in which both souls and spaces were imperilled by heresy.