Some places feel straight out of a medieval legend—stone walls stretching into the distance, towers rising above the rooftops, and narrow lanes winding through centuries of history... Carcassonne, the ...

In the south of France there was a long crusade in the thirteenth century against heretics known as Cathars (the ‘Albigensian crusade’). In 1204, during the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, ...

When the victorious knights of the First Crusade finally stood in Jerusalem, on July 15, 1099, they were, in the words of the chronicler William of Tyre, “dripping with blood from head to foot ...

The Cathar Crusades also led to the emergence of the Catholic Inquisition as a force to be reckoned with and to important military innovations, such as the invention of the precision stone trebuchet.

Departing crusaders routinely attacked Jews, giving them the options of slaughter or forced baptism (many preferred collective suicide). In the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4, the Venetians diverted the ...

History is replete with genocide. Among the earliest was the Albigensian Crusade 0f 1209 that sparked the Cathar genocide in southern France. In the 20th century, the Turkish genocide of 1915 ...

The crusades were not limited to fighting against the Turks or whoever controlled the Holy Land. In 1208 what was known as the Albigensian Crusade was initated by the Pope against the Cathars ...

In the first of two extracts from her new book, Revolution in Carcassonne, Elaine Graham-Leigh explains how and why the city ...