From the 1230s onward members of the military Order known as the Teutonic Knights were also subjugating the Prussians—a Baltic people—and imposing Christianity on them. In Western Europe, however, the campaign (1209–29) to extinguish the Cathar heresy—a Christian religious sect that flourished in the Languedoc region of southwestern France—acquired a particular notoriety. These rebels of the Midi posed a direct and explicit challenge to the papacy’s interpretation of Christianity, and the methods used to crush them were correspondingly violent. The papal conviction that it could both identify heresy and had the right to extinguish it in the name of orthodoxy testified to the institution’s new self-confidence during this period. But the defeat of the Cathars also had important political and cultural ramifications since it gave the French Crown a new authority in the southwest of the country. This was the region, including Languedoc, which was widely known as Occitania. The province had its distinctive customs that it shared with neighboring Aragon to the south, as well as its own Latin language (the langue d’oc).
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