In 1300 a great orator emerged who brought together the currents of resistance. Three years later the terrible prisons were stormed and the inmates set free. The orator was a Franciscan friar, Bernard Delicieux. This book, which forms a kind of sequel to the bestselling "The Perfect Heresy", tells h[...]
Even in this predominantly secular age, Britain's cathedrals remain potent symbols of religious continuity. Their purpose was to reveal God's majesty, to declare the supremacy of the Church and the devotion of the men who built them. They were intended, literally, to be awesome. Similarly, our medie[...]
In 1300, the French region of Languedoc had been cowed under the authority of both Rome and France since Pope Innocent III 's Albigensian Crusade nearly a century earlier. That crusade almost wiped out the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians whose beliefs threatened the authority of the Catholi[...]