A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (review)

The title of this book serves warning that the author is an ironist. His villains are "the army of God," or "soldiers of Christ, or "heavenly avengers"; his lead villain is "a model Christian prince"; the actions of his villains "epitomized sanguine beauty." But dripping irony is by no means Pegg's only rhetorical mode. Villains "hiss," "whisper slyly," "swagger"; they do not merely "burn and slaughter" but do so "joyously"; massacres "delight" them. The decibel level is continually high: a nasty abbot "gallops hard all summer"; innocent victims "terrified by ribald fury" seek to escape with "crying and weeping." Vultures are never plain vultures but always "black vultures." What is the point of all this? If Pegg thinks he is telling a ripsnorting good story, he might realize that most readers prefer not to be bludgeoned. Yet he surely believes that he is shouting for a larger purpose. For him, "the Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His sacrifice on the cross." I have no intention of siding with the Crusaders (is there anyone today who does?) but find that I need to make two objections. Technically, the "crusade indulgence" did not assure salvation; one gained absolution from sin by contrite confession and absolution-the crusade indulgence concerned time spent in purgatory after one was assured salvation. If that distinction may seem to some a quibble, the easy use of the word genocide should not. The crusade was proclaimed against unbelievers (whether justly or unjustly is another question), not against a "genus" or people; those who joined the crusade had no intention of annihilating the population of southern France. If Pegg's message is that Christians have a long history of slaughtering in the name of the faith, he might have started with Charlemagne or devoted more than two paragraphs to the First Crusade. If Pegg wishes to connect the Albigensian Crusade to modern ethnic slaughter, well-words fail me (as they do him).