Normierte Form:

This article contributes new evidence and a new perspective to the study of the religious heresy known as Waldensianism in high medieval Languedoc and its relationship to both orthodox authority and the 'Cathar' heresy. Although they were outlawed by Rome in 1184, until the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) Waldensians operated openly, and with clerical complicity, in the Cathar lands pertaining to the viscounts of Béziers and the counts of Toulouse and Foix. The crusade's northern French army attacked Cathars and their noble supporters, but began executing Waldensians too. This article offers a precise chronology and demography for these processes of toleration and persecution. It reveals for the first time that, from 1209, Waldensian refugees relocated beyond the warzone, fleeing to the county of Rodez, the north of the county of Quercy, and the duchy of Gascony, and so were no longer to be found in the Cathar heartlands. This in turn sheds light on the wider process of suppressing minority religious groups in the high Middle Ages, particularly through their social and geographical dislocation and assimilation, and contributes to the related historiographical debate concerning the nature of heresy in medieval Languedoc.