
After the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of south-west France in 1208, a Spanish monk
- later canonized as St Dominic
- took up the cudgels by establishing a kind of secret police to ferret out heresy
- thus began the infamous Inquisition. Baigent & Leigh tell the whole extraordinary story, taking it on into the nineteenth century & showing how after the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility in 1870, the Vatican attempted to establish new authorities that were an intellectual equivalent of the Inquisition. ” The Inquisition” offers a fascinating narrative account of one of the most influential & horrifying movements in the history of western Europe.