In the south, on the two banks of the Rhone and the Garonne, along the Mediterranean, and by the Pyrenees, it had encountered all manner of institutions, traditions, religions, and disbeliefs, Greek, Roman, African, Oriental, Pagan, and Mussulman; the frequent invasions and long stay of the Saracens in those countries had mingled Arab blood with the Gallic, Roman, Asiatic, and Visigothic, and this mixture of so many different races, tongues, creeds, and ideas had resulted in a civilization more developed, more elegant, more humane, and more liberal, but far less coherent, simple, and strong, morally as well as politically, than the warlike, feudal civilization of Germanic France.

In the religious order especially, the dissimilarity was profound.

In Northern France, in spite of internal disorder, and through the influence of its bishops, missionaries, and monastic reformers, the orthodox Church had obtained a decided superiority and full dominion; but in Southern France, on the contrary, all the controversies, all the sects, and all the mystical or philosophical heresies which had disturbed Christendom from the second century to the ninth, had crept in and spread abroad.

In it there were Arians, Manicheans, Gnostics, Paulicians, Cathars (the pure), and other sects of more local or more recent origin and name, Albigensians, Vaudians, Good People and Poor of Lyons, some piously possessed with the desire of returning to the pure faith and fraternal organization of the primitive evangelical Church, others given over to the extravagances of imagination or asceticism.

The princes and the great laic lords of the country, the Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and Comminges, the Viscount of Beziers, and many others had not remained unaffected by this condition of the people: the majority were accused of tolerating and even protecting the heretics; and some were suspected of allowing their ideas to penetrate within their own households.