Re-mapping the ‘Great Inquisition’ of 1245–46: The Case of Mas-Saintes-Puelles and Saint-Martin-Lalande

Abstract

MS 609 of the Bibliotheque municipale de Toulouse contains the registry of the largest known medieval inquisition, the so-called ‘Great Inquisition’ lead by two Dominicans at Toulouse between 1245 and 1246. Since its discovery in the nineteenth century, this registry has remained unedited and is rarely studied in detail. Yet it has become famous for being the record of a broad inquisition into the ‘general state of the faith’, one that affirms that Catharism – the theory of a dualist, organized heretical counter-Church which brought the Albigensian crusade and eventual inquisition to the lands of the Count of Toulouse – was widespread between Toulouse and Carcassonne. This article argues that the registry does not record any general survey of Cathar heresy among the population, but rather it records an inquisition principally aimed at collecting evidence against village consulates who had no greater or lesser relationship to any ‘heresy’ than the rest of the population. This argument is made by challenging the historiographic bias towards sampling the registry anecdotally, replacing it with an evaluation based on a combination of macroanalysis and close reading facilitated by the author’s digital edition of MS 609 and network analysis techniques.