Eight hundred years ago, they were hunted to extinction. Or so the Church believed.
The imPerfect Cathar series begins with a simple enough premise: Paul Bonhomme, the last immortal Cathar heretic, is alive and wisecracking his way through modern-day Toulouse. But who were the Cathars, really? And why did they inspire one of the bloodiest religious campaigns in medieval European history?
The real story is stranger, more compelling, and considerably more violent than most people realise.
What Were the Cathars?
The Cathars — known in their own time as Bons Chrétiens, or Good Christians — were a religious movement that flourished across the Languedoc region of southern France from roughly the 12th to the 14th century. They weren’t a fringe cult. At their peak, Catharism was the dominant faith across much of what is now the south of France, with the support of local nobility, merchants, and ordinary people in equal measure.
Their theology was dualist: they believed the material world had been created not by the God of light and spirit, but by an evil or lesser god — the God of the Old Testament, in their reading. The true God was pure spirit. The world was a trap. Salvation lay in escaping the cycle of reincarnation and returning to the divine light.
Sound familiar? If you’ve read the series, you’ll recognise the bones of that worldview running through Paul Bonhomme’s existence — an immortal consciousness cycling through bodies, unable to escape, carrying the weight of every life he’s lived.
How Did They Live?
Cathar society was divided into two groups: the Perfecti (Perfects) and the Credentes (Believers).
The Perfecti — like Paul was, before everything went wrong — were the spiritual elite. They took strict vows of poverty, chastity, and non-violence. They were vegetarians. They didn’t eat meat, eggs, or cheese. They owned nothing. They travelled in pairs, preaching and performing the consolamentum, a kind of spiritual baptism that was the central sacrament of the faith.
The Credentes were the ordinary believers, who lived normal lives and received the consolamentum only at death. The thinking was that the rigorous life of a Perfect was too demanding for most people — but that a deathbed consolamentum was enough to ensure eventual salvation.
What made the Cathars genuinely radical for their time was their egalitarianism. Women could be Perfects. Tolerance toward other faiths was preached rather than punished. The clergy were expected to live humbly — not to accumulate wealth and political power. This last point, in particular, did not endear them to Rome.
Why Did the Church Destroy Them?
In 1208, Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade — named for the city of Albi, a Cathar stronghold — against the heretics of the Languedoc. It was the first crusade ever launched against fellow Christians within Europe.
The crusade was catastrophic. The sacking of Béziers in 1209 is one of the most notorious events of the medieval period. When crusaders asked the papal legate how to distinguish Cathars from Catholics in the city, the reply — attributed to Arnaud Amaury, though possibly apocryphal — was reported as: “Kill them all. God will know his own.” Somewhere between seven thousand and twenty thousand people were killed in a single afternoon.
The campaign lasted twenty years. Entire towns were razed. The noble families who had protected the Cathars were dispossessed. The Inquisition was effectively created as a tool to root out remaining heretics.
The last major Cathar stronghold, the mountain fortress of Montségur, fell in 1244. Over two hundred Perfecti were burned alive at the foot of the mountain rather than renounce their faith.
By the early 14th century, the last known Cathar Perfect — a man named Guillaume Bélibaste — was burned at the stake in 1321. The movement, as far as the historical record is concerned, was extinguished.
What Survived?
The landscape survived. The Languedoc — Toulouse, Carcassonne, the Pyrénéan foothills, the Corbières — is still saturated with Cathar history. Ruined châteaux perch on impossible ridgelines. The village of Montaillou, subject of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s celebrated reconstruction of medieval life, still exists. The Cathar Trail runs through the region, connecting the fortresses and sites of a civilisation that was deliberately, systematically erased.
The questions they asked survived too. The problem of evil — if God is good, why does suffering exist? — is older than Christianity and hasn’t been resolved since. The Cathar answer, that this world was never meant to be good, has a bleak coherence that’s hard to entirely dismiss.
And in the imPerfect Cathar series, Paul survived. Against all evidence to the contrary.
The History in the Books
The series doesn’t require any knowledge of Cathar history to enjoy — Paul himself is the first to admit he’s not exactly living up to the standards of a Perfect. But for readers who want to go deeper, the historical backdrop is real: the crusade, the Inquisition, the fortresses, the Languedoc, Toulouse as the cultural heart of the medieval south.
Paul’s immortality is rooted in a very specific Cathar belief — that the soul reincarnates until it achieves sufficient purity to escape the material world. The twist is that he broke his vows, which means no clean escape. Just an indefinite sentence of dying and waking up in the nearest available body, wisecracking his way through eight hundred years of chaos.
It’s a very Cathar problem, when you think about it.
→ Start with the free prequel novella, An imPerfect Trap
→ Browse the complete imPerfect Cathar series
→ Explore the world behind the books