Innocent III launches the Albigensian Crusade

1208

After a papal legate was murdered in Languedoc, Innocent III called down crusade on the Cathar heretics of southern France. Northern knights rode south eager for fiefs, and a distinctive Occitan civilization of troubadours and merchant towns began to burn. The twenty-year campaign would annex the south to the French crown and create the institutional machinery of the Inquisition.