Zoe Oldenbourg
Setting the Parameters for Modern Western Genocide, January 7, 2014
Establishing the template for Christian Barbary
In January of 1208, a papal legate was murdered on the banks of the Rhone in southern France. A furious Pope Innocent III, accused heretics of the crime and called upon all Christians to exterminate heresy between the Garonne and Rhone rivers–a vast (now very popular wine-producing region) known as Languedoc — in a great crusade. This most holy of wars, the first in which Christians were promised salvation for killing other Christians, lasted twenty bloody years. It was a long savage war fought for the very soul of Christendom.
The author, Zoe Oldenbourg, born in St Petersburg in 1916 and educated at the Lycee Moliere and the Sorbonne, has produced a swift-moving, gripping novelistic narrative of this horrific crusade. Like others before her, she has drawn in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245 and woven it into a stunning narrative.
