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[...]
War has diverse and seemingly contradictory effects on liberal democratic institutions and processes. It has led democracies to abandon their principles, expanding executive authority and restricting civil liberties, but it has also prompted the development of representative parliamentary institutio[...]
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[...]
A rich and sobering exploration of war -- and of the meaning of history -- that will engage general readers and military buffs alike. The Western Front, the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the English Channel to Switzerland during the First World War, also formed a scar on the i[...]
The Cathars, a group of heretical Christians from all walks of society, high and low, flourished in what is now the Languedoc in Southern France. Their subversive beliefs brought down on them the wrath of Popes and monarchs and provoked a brutal 'Crusade' against them.[...]