The legates, after having reproached him vehemently, determined to leave St.Gilles without further delay, and the day after their departure (January 15th, 1208), as they were getting ready to cross the Rhone, two strangers, who had lodged the night before in the same hostelry with them, drew near, and one of the two gave Peter de Castelnau a lance-thrust with such force, that the legate, after exclaiming, "God forgive thee, as I do!" had only time to give his comrade his last instructions, and then expired.
Great was the emotion in France and at Rome.

It was barely thirty years since in England, after an outburst of passion on the part of King Henry II., four knights of his court had murdered the Archbishop Thomas-a- Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

Was the Count of Toulouse, too, guilty of having instigated the shedding of blood and the murder of a prelate?
Such was, in the thirteenth century, the general cry throughout the Catholic Church and the signal for war against Raymond VI.; a war undertaken on the plea of a personal crime, but in reality for the extirpation of heresy in Southern France, and for the dispossession of the native princes, who would not fully obey the decrees of the papacy, in favor of foreign conquerors who would put them into execution.

The crusade against the Albigensians was the most striking application of two principles equally false and fatal, which did more than as much evil to the Catholics as to the heretics, and to the papacy as to freedom; and they are, the right of the spiritual power to claim for the coercion of souls the material force of the temporal powers, and its right to strip temporal sovereigns, in case they set at nought its injunctions, of their title to the obedience of their people; in other words, denial of religious liberty to conscience and of political independence to states.
It was by virtue of these two principles, at that time dominant, but not without some opposition, in Christendom, that Innocent III., in 1208, summoned the King of France, the great lords and the knights, and the clergy, secular and regular, of the kingdom to assume the cross and go forth to extirpate from Southern France the Albigensians, "worse than the Saracens;" and that he promised to the chiefs of the crusaders the sovereignty of such domains as they should win by conquest from the princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics.
Throughout all France, and even outside of France, the passions of religion and ambition were aroused at this summons.
Twelve abbots and twenty monks of Citeaux dispersed themselves in all directions preaching the crusade; and lords and knights, burghers and peasants, laymen and clergy, hastened to respond.

"From near and far they came," says the contemporary poet-chronicler, William of Tudela; "there be men from Auvergne and Burgundy, France and Limousin; there be men from all the world; there be Germans, Poitevines, Gascons, Rouergats, and Saintongese.