Thread by @nonregemesse

‘Kill them all; God will know His own.’

Today in AD 1209 the army of the Albigensian Crusade massacred the inhabitants of the town of Beziers.

It was a day of butchery and bloodshed.

On the 21st of July the army, led by the Papal legate, the Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud Amalric, reached the town of Beziers.

Not many townsfolk has decided to leave and the Bishop of Beziers attempted to negotiate. He was given a list of 222 of Cathars & Waldensians to hand over.

However, these people were too influential in the town and it was not possible to simply hand them over to the besieging crusaders.

At this point the Bishop asked the Catholic townsfolk to save themselves and leave but they refused.

On the morning on the 22nd, a sortie came out from the town which was quickly attacked by mercenaries among the crusaders, driving it back inside the town, along with some of the mercenaries who fought for control of the gate.

When the main army saw this they decided to attack.

These mercenaries, called routiers, rampaged through the streets, killing indiscriminately and plundering as they went. The crusading knights did nothing to stop them except to intervene to appropriate the plunder. The angry routiers decided to burn the town in response.

In Caesarius of Heisterbach’s account of the sack, he recalls a soldier asking the abbot Amalric:

‘Sir, what shall we do, for we cannot distinguish between the faithful and the heretics.’

To which he infamously replied;

‘Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His.’

And so, according the Amalric’s own likely inflated account, 20,000 townsfolk are said to have been massacred.

In the aftermath of this brutality, many nearby towns and castles surrendered quickly to the crusade in hopes of avoiding the fate of Beziers.

The Albigensian Crusade lasted ten years and is thought to have caused the deaths of between 200,000 to a million people.