In the early years of the fourteenth century the Catholic Church extinguished the heretical fire of the Cathars in south-western France. This was the last stronghold of a people forced - after more than a century of repression and bloodshed - to hide their extraordinary beliefs in the isolated villages of the Pyrenees. But despite the Church's success at exterminating the Cathars, it could not destroy their memory. Across the landscape and deep in the Vatican vaults, evidence of the Cathars has survived to the present day.
Arming himself with contemporary accounts and conducting his own researches in the Pyrenees and beyond, Rene Weiss tells the gripping story of the last Cathars' doomed fight for survival in this major work of detection, scholarship and storytelling.
