In tandem with this, increasing numbers of lay people openly questioned both the wealth of the Church and the moral qualities of some of its clerics. Men such as Waldes of Lyons gave up a comfortable lifestyle to follow a more spiritual approach and his calls for austerity attracted numerous followers. Notwithstanding his overt criticism of the Church, Waldes was, at heart, still fairly close to orthodox Catholicism, although his demands to be allowed to preach in public were rejected by the papacy, jealous to preserve proprietorship of what it regarded as the true interpretation of the Gospels.2 Around the middle of the century, however, another strand of religious belief began to surface: Catharism (from the Greek kathare meaning “pure”), a radical set of ideas that posed a profound challenge to the power of the Catholic Church. To fight this threat Pope Innocent launched the Albigensian Crusade, a conflict that brought the horrors of holy war to the heart of Christendom and engendered levels of atrocity unseen in Europe since the barbarian invasions.
