Stephen O’Shea’s The Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of the Cathars was published in 2000; he is writing a study of Muslim-Christian clashes in the Middle Ages.
One sunny afternoon last month I sat drinking a glass of tea in the office of a functionary in Mus, a market town in eastern Anatolia known for producing sugar beets, tobacco and violence. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Turkish Army put down an insurgency in the area, killing tens of thousands of people, most of whom believed eastern Anatolia should be labelled western Kurdistan. During the...
The medieval Cathars have often been thought of as distinctively Southern French. In fact, they are first securely documented, and named, as a distinct group in the mid-12th-century Rhineland....
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