Thread by @AnihilatedSudak

The Cagots: Europe's untouchables
When you think of an "untouchable caste", a social group of people seen as lower and relegated to certain jobs and social roles, you might think of the Indian Dalit. But what if I told you that something very similar happened in Europe? 🧵

The idea of a caste system usually takes the mind to medieval Asia, in places like India, with those with the least amount of blood from the Aryan invaders were relegated to lower roles in society, with the difference in social roles running so deep it can even be seen today.

It might also make one think of Medieval Japan's own strict social class system, and of the Burakumin caste, relegated to social roles considered "spiritually polluting" by Japanese society, and that might've had higher Jomon ancestry than the average Japanese.

However, a very similar situation (widespread hatred and maltretment by other social classes included) occurred with a group of people in western France and northern Spain: the Cagots, also known as Agots, Agotes, Cacots, Cahotes, Capots or Agotak.

Though other groups, such as the Gypsies and Jews, were also mistreated in Medieval Europe, these groups were distinct either genetically, religiously or both, and in the case of the Gypsies, they greatly differed in lifestyle aswell, being nomads. This was not the case for Agots

The Agots spoke the same language (largely Spanish and Occitan, sometimes French, Breton and Castillian), followed the same religion and were largely genetically the exact same as all their neighboring peoples. Despite this, they were widely hated and excluded from society.

Cagots were forbidden to marry non-Cagots (leading in to forced endogamy), were described as "cannibal, heretic, and delivered unto all vices” and were not even allowed to enter churches by the front doors, but rather through side doors made for them.

They were not allowed to be baptized in the same fonts as everyone else (the pic above and the pic below show the baptismal fonts made for Cagots) and unlike everyone else, their baptisms were done at night, and with no chimes rung to celebrate the occasion.

They were considered unclean, either lepers themselves or tainted by having leper ancestors, and so even during communion, the wafer would be either thrown at them or administered by a wooden spoon if the priest was sympathetic.

They were physically segregated from their own societies too, and Cagots would generally live either in their own quarters or ghettoes called cagoteries, usually in the far outskirts of the villages and towns they resided in.

They were buried in separate cementeries, and riots were reported when bishops tried to bury Cagots in regular cementeries. In France did not have surnames, but rather their first name followed by "Cagot" or "Crestians", and they were forbidden from joining the clergy.

To distinguish themselves from the "clean" social classes, they originally had to carry the foot of a goose or a duck with them (from which they gained another epithet, "Canards"), though eventually that became a red (if French) or yellow (if Basque) trim on their cloaks.

The symbol of the duck's foot became a symbol for the Cagots, and long after the end of their discrimination and their disappearence, it'd be used in protests against social marginalization, for example in the French protests against the vaccine passport.

Cagots had many names,which led to many associations with possible origins that we will get into later,but one common association with the Cagots was uncleanliness as their Breton name "Cacous" (from "cacodd", "leper") and their Occitan name "gens de marais" ("swamp people") show

Due to this, they were forbidden from selling food and wine or even touching food at a market, working with livestock or entering mills, they weren't even allowed to touch the baptismal fonts for non-Cagots, and those that did could get their hands cut off or worse.

They were often restricted to a few trades, most commonly carpenters, masons, woodcutters and wood carvers, but sometimes also to jobs seen as unclean, such as coopers, butchers, and rope-makers, while Cagot women would be almost exclusively midwives until the 15th century.

Due to their experience at woodworking, they would often be employed as the builders and operators of torture devices, aswell as executioners and grave-diggers, positions which would contribute to the generalized hatred and fear felt towards them, and their image as "cannibals".

So foul and unclean were they considered by their neighbors, that it was believed a Cagot could make a child go ill with a mere touch or glance, and it was a crime for them to walk barefoot across a town's main road or to share a drinking cup with a non-Cagot.

Despite their margination, and the belief that they were mentally inferior (even seen as a whole race victim of cretinism, even though cretins born of non-Cagots would be kept separate from Cagots) discrimination gradually waned.

The Cagots appealed to Pope Leo X in 1514, saying that their mistreatment stemmed from their origins as their descendants of Cathars (something false, as Cagots existed before the Albigensian heresy), and as such their status as heretics should've ended after four generations.

Cagots were not present in Italy, and the Pope likely did not know of the plight of the Cagots until their appeal, so he published a bull instructing that the Cagots be treated "with kindness, in the same way as the other believers." Most local authorities ignored the bull.

It wasn't until after the French Revolution that the legal discrimination against the Cagots was formally abolished in France, and later on the same was done in Spain, though the Cagot identity and the social stigma against them still lingered for generations.

The last Cagot community was the hamlet of Bozate, within the village of Arizcun, where the prejudice against Cagots persisted well into the 20th century. A common saying in that area was "al agote, garrotazo en el cogote" (to the Cagot, a club to the throat)

Today, Cagots no longer exist as a distinct group, having mixed into the rest of society, though some of their descendants still identify as such, but it's rare, as the Cagots wanted nothing more than to stop being "the other".

Surnames today releting to Basque Cagot ancestry are Bidegain, Errotaberea, Zaldua, Maistruarena, Amorena, and Santxotena. As for the French, it's harder to find, but Cagots migrated to New France more often than non-Cagots, so if you're Quebecois, you might be one.

But you might be wondering "if the Cagots were pretty much the exact same as everyone else around them both linguistically, religiously and ethnically, then why were they hated so much? Where did their marginalization originate from?"

Well stay tuned, after a brief break, I'll resume the thread and attempt to find an answer to the misterious origin of the Western untouchables.

Basque**** and Occitan

Thanks for sticking around, let's get back to the topic at hand: what are the origins of the Cagots?

Of course, we already mentioned one of the suppoused origins, that they were descended from the Cathars, a heretical sect of Christianity that arose in southern France who were wiped out during the Albigensian Crusade in 1229. However, Cagots were mentioned before Catharism.

A few origins based in Biblical stories were invented to explain the existence of the Cagots, specifically by the non-Cagots. The most popular claimed that they were the descendants of the carpenters that made Christ's cross, similar to the idea that Gypsies made the nails.

Another story, going back to the Old Testament, claims that the Cagots were descended from a Pyrenean carver named Jacques, who travelled to Israel to cast Boaz and Jachin, the two pillars flanking Solomon's temple.

Distracted by a woman, Jacques damaged Jachin, and God cursed him and all of his descendants to carry leprosy.

Leprosy and other sicknesses such as herpes were also closely associated with the Cagots, some believing that they were the descendants of lepers, cretins and other physically and mentally ill people who remained tainted generations after whichever plague affected them.

Cagots were commonly accused of being pagans, sorcerers, werewolves, cannibals and sexual deviants, and many times they were associated with the old Celtic paganism that once existed across Gaul and Spain. This leads us to their other possible origins: historical origins.

One possible ethimology for Agote, the Spanish and Basque term for Cagots, might come from the Celtic word Bagaudae, meaning "fighter". The Bagaudae were Gallic and later Gallo-Roman mercenaries that usually revolted and were suppressed by the Western Roman Empire.

The Bagaudae weren't only professional soldiers, but rather were largely peasant revolts led by the less romanised Celt-descended peoples of Gaul and Spain, which formed a sort of underclass in that region even late into Roman history.

It is not very likely that the Cagots are any more descended from the old Celts than any other Frenchman and Spaniard, but it is not impossible. Of note is that the Bagaudae revolts ocurred in conjunction, and sometimes in cooperation with Germanic invasions.

By the middle of the fifth century they are mentioned in control of parts of central Gaul and the Ebro valley. In Hispania, the king of the Suevi, Rechiar, took up as allies the local bagaudae in ravaging the remaining Roman municipia.

This association with the Germanic invaders leads into the most popular, and perhaps one of the likeliest, options for the ancestry of the much-despised Cagots: the Goths.

Before we move on to them, however, it's important to note that many of the first Bagaudae revolts, which happened around AD 284, are considered by many modern historians to have been Christian uprisings. This will be relevant to a later possible origin.

Now, back to the Goths, more specifically the Visigoths, the idea that Cagots are descended from them is very straightfoward, ethimologically. "Cagot" seems to be a term derived from the Occitan "caas gòt", meaning "Gothic dog".

As this theory goes, the Cagots are the descendants of the Visigoths in the Battle of Vouillé, where Alaric II was slain and all of Gallia Aquitania was seized by the Franks. The Cagots on Spain then might be explained as the descendants of the Visigoths defeated by the Moors.

An issue with this idea is that, although the Cagots as a group did exist since at least the 10th century, the term "Cagot" itself has no recorded mention until the 16th century, and although other terms, such as the Basque Agotak, do seem to have the root "got", others don't.

Another possibility is that "Cagot" doesn't mean "Gothic dog" but rather "hunter of Goths", and that the Cagots were descended from the Moorish invaders that stayed behind after their armies were defeated by Charles Martel. This idea however has been discarded since the 1700s.

Another possibility, and one that ties in somewhat with the Gothic, Celtic and Moorish theories (though for different reasons) is that their origin wasn't necessarily ethnic but religious. Some of the earliest mentions of Cagots names them "Crestias", "Christians".

This mention was long after the Christianization of Europe, but the fact that they were known as Christians (one of the two surnames they were allowed to carry in France, alongside "Cagot") can imply four different origins.

One, and the simplest one, is that they were simply a community of Pyrenee woodsmen, possibly releted to the Basques, who Christianized relatively late and were discriminated against for it.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some believe that the Cadots were among the earliest of early Christians, the first to convert to Christianity in Gallia and the Pyrenees. The hatred their Pagan neighbors held for them persisted even after they became Christian aswell.

Another option is, again, ethimological. The word Cagot could not mean anything releted to the Goths at all, but rather coming from the Latin term "caco Deus", "those that lie to God". According to this theory, the Cagots would be descended from the Alans who practiced Arianism.

Finally, another alternative is that the Cagots were the descendants of apostates, specifically of the Visigoths, Gauls and Hispanians that converted to Islam during the brief Islamic rule over Northern Spain and Southern France.

These people, once the Franks, Basques and Asturians reconquered those lands, would've been forced to convert back to Christianity, and then, due to their prior apostasy and the hatred from their neighbors, they'd be ostracized and seen as cursed long after the Moors were gone.

Whatever their origins were, by the late middle ages and early modern period, they would've been pretty much indistinguishable from their neighbors, hence the requirement to use the "duck's foot" as identification. Still, they were often stereotyped as lacking earlobes.

Another theory, and one that has grown more popular in recent years, is that the Cagots were descended from a fallen carpenter's guild that worked in the 9th and 10th century around the Way of St. James, largely corresponding to the Cagot-inhabited regions.

The duck's foot worn by the Cagots might've been the guild's original symbol, and since mentions of Cagots became more and more common around the same time the construction boom was going on, it's not unlikely.

By the early 20th century, legal discrimination against the Cagots had ended, but the social stigma still remained, and the descendants of Cagots were still identified as such and marginalized, seen as spiritually, racially or cognitively inferior to non-Cagots.

It was in this context that Spanish writer and amateur phrenologist Pío Baroja visited Bozate to investigate the denizens of the last Cagot community. He described them as such:

"Wide big-boned face. Strong skeletons, protruding cheekbones, strong bizygomatic distance, large blue or light green eyes, somewhat oblique. Brachycephalous skull, pale white skin and brown or blond hair. They don't at all resemble the typical Basque...

It's a central or northern European type. Some old folks in Bozate look like Durero portraits, with a Germanic air about them, though there are also others with a longer, darker face that resembles the Gypsy."

Now, of course, the claims of a 1918 phrenologist are to be taken with a slight grain of salt, but it's an interesting fact nontheless, and many modern-day descendants of Cagots, especially in the Basque Country, use it to claim a Gothic heritage.

In opposition to these claims, however, British writer Graham Robb writes:
"Nearly all the old and modern theories are unsatisfactory ... the real "mystery of the cagots" was the fact that they had no distinguishing features at all.

They spoke whatever dialect was spoken in the region and their family names were not peculiar to the cagots...

The only real difference was that, after eight centuries of persecution, they tended to be more skillful and resourceful than the surrounding populations, and more likely to emigrate to America. They were feared because they were persecuted and might therefore seek revenge."

And with that, we reach the end of this thread. The Cagots are now a historical memory, and thankfully their descendants are now integrated into society, much like their ancestors would've wanted.

So, what do you think? What were the origins of the Cagots? Were they persecuted ex-apostates? The children of lepers? The sons of Gothic warriors, Moorish invaders, Gaulish reavers? A disgraced guild working on a holy road? Or just poor people being mistreated for being poor?