The Yellow Cross

Montaillou, in south-west France, must be the best-documented medieval village in Europe. The detailed reports on life in this small rural community, made by the Inquisition in the 13th and 14th centuries, are preserved in the Vatican (saved there from destruction during the French Revolution) and hold up for us a moment crystallized in time. Over 20 years ago, the renowned social historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie brought us masterful depiction of the village and its inhabitants; in this book Weis examines Montaillou afresh in The Yellow Cross. The Story of the Last Cathars, 1290-1329. The Cathars were a group of heretics who flourished in the Occitan in the 13th century, amounting to what was probably the most serious internal threat to the Catholic Church before the advent of Protestanism. They were dualists, who held that the soul was divine and the body sinful. They refused to accept, for example, that the bread and wine used during the sacrament literally was Christ's flesh and blood because they could not accept that Christ's flesh and blood could be tainted by coming into contact with a sinner's profane body. In a landscape as desloate as it is beautiful it is no wonder the Cathars sought salvation with such passion, defying church and society to follow their beliefs. But these people were no saints. As well as deliverance, they also sought wealth, power, and sex. The story Weis tells, that of the last Cathars' brief rise and fall, is one of lust, betrayel and murder. The complicated cast of characters includes a sexually insatiable double-dealing priest, an avaricious shepherd-turned-Perfect (a Cathar priest) who redeemed himself in captivity by refusing to recant or inform, and a self-appointed undercover agent seeking to avenge his mother's death. Weis's account combines scholarship with hands-on detection, and the result is a fascinating window onto a world very distant from our own. Reviewed by Lucy Moore (Kirkus UK)