The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Now That's What I Call Culture -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 2)

But of course they're au fait with sadism.

For if the Spanish Inquisition proved there was nothing new about fetishizing cruelty, it took a French aristocrat to give it a good name.

The term sadisme swaggered into Western civilization around 1834, twenty years after the death of its namesake, a pornographer with literary pretensions who was reviled in his own time but later venerated as 'the Divine Marquis.'

From the age of twenty-three, the French government locked the Marquis de Sade up for most of his adult life, inadvertently gifting him the time and boredom to crank out such masturbatory epics as 120 Days of Sodom and Gomorrah (penned in the Bastille just before the Revolution).

True to cliché, there's plenty of sex in Sade the ballet.

TITILLATING THE 21ST CENTURY

Like practically every other take on the man who married Madame Slap with Monsieur Tickle, the dance version is based on the porno-philosopher's last years, locked up in a mental hospital on the orders of Napoleon.

To satisfy his theatrical urges, Sade was allowed to produce plays starring himself and his fellow inmates—a case of a 'madman' running an asylum.

And at first, The Theatre of Fools is interesting enough, not least because it features one of France's most beautiful ballerinas, Marie-Claude Pietragalla.

Her small troupe from Paris starts out in tight-fitting asylum-wear—imagine if Danskin did straitjackets—performing poignantly disjointed pas de deux.

This being art, though—specifically, French art of the titillated 21st century—it's only a matter of minutes before the first dildo rears its ugly—well, you know—and the dancers start getting their breasts out.

Now that's what I call culture.

Over the next two hours (sadistically sans intermission), most of the major perversions get a look in, along with a few minor ones: there's lots of bondage gear, riding crops, chains and black leather, some cross-dressing, simulated group sex, rape and sodomy with a smattering of cannibalism and even a bit of ponyboy training, all amid much angsty yammering and stagey madness.

The History of Sex: Seville -- Why Men Are Don Juans -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 16)

Wright ended his night with the 'white slave trader' in the bar where I'm sitting now:

'And in each place, he signed up girls to work in the whorehouses of North Africa.'

Now, as with the Inquisition, it's not common knowledge that Seville was a hub of sex trafficking under Franco, with white católicas willingly venturing to Africa to sleep with dark-skinned Muslims.

How many family homes in Seville must have been bought with the proceeds of prostitution? Granny, where were you in the Fifties?

It's not a particularly polite question to ask a proud sevillano.

And anyway, I'm here to find out about Don Juan.

DON JUAN IN THE FLESH

Alfonso Sanchez played the legendary womanizer in a local theatre production that combined three incarnations of the Don on one stage: Molina's hellbound original, the wise-cracking atheist envisaged by Moliere and the most popular version, Jose Zorrilla's religious romantic, a man who's redeemed by the love of a good (Catholic) woman.

In casting the main character, the director told me that her Don Juans had to look like they'd give a girl 'the best sex in the world.'

I'm not the best judge, but Alfonso is dark and bearded, and what he lacks in height he makes up with poise, carrying himself with actorly self regard.

What's more, Alfonso's an actor with a brain.

Alfonso and a musician
outside the historic Bar Citroen

'I had a bit of a phobia about playing Don Juan, because in my life, it's always been present,' he admits. 'My father is a total Don Juan. So I've lived it. And it has its light and dark sides. I was also a little afraid of confronting my own ghosts.'

While we're exorcizing our demons, I suppose I should confess that there was a time when I was called a Don Juan, though it never seemed much of a compliment, mainly because it sounds synonymous with 'male slut.'

After centuries of cogitation about what makes a man a mujeriego—mother issues, arrested development, being an incurable romantic, etcetera—the best reason I've been able to come up with is far more prosaic: Don Juans cheat because they can.

If men weren't indulged as rogues, victims or sex addicts, if they were stigmatized in the same way that—oh, I don't know—'bad' women have been repudiated for ages—well, I reckon the fanciful Don Juan 'gene' would quickly die out.

'THE GREAT TRAGEDY'

Alfonso doesn't disagree with this view, though he reckons there's a strong cultural element to being a Denomination-of-Origin Don.

'In the culture of the south, the myth of Don Juan is ever-present, especially in relationships with women. It turns into a relationship of conquest. Everything is conquest. You go to have a coffee, and you arrive at a moment of conquest. It's as if it makes you more manly—in theory. But it's self-destructive.'

He shakes his head when I mention guides like The Game and its Spanish imitator.

'That's fascinating,' he says. 'It's the opposite of the process I've gone through.'

Instead, he recommends a cure for Don Juanism: playing the Don onstage.

'It forces you to be conscious of your own limitations. Because the things you do without thinking about them, out of a tradition that obliges you to be a Don Juan, or a need for conquest, you realize that isn't the essence of who you are: you're searching for something else.'

'The great tragedy of Don Juan is that he's constantly searching for God—or rather, pure love. And he doesn't find it—until he meets the love of his life.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Seville -- Rape as a Weapon -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 10)

That claim that would have appalled the late 'Generalissimo of Spain' and self-styled 'Leader of the Last Crusade and of the Hispanic World.'

Not that he was a big fan of Don Juans.

Francisco Franco's father had been a womanizing military man who was often away from home (has anybody seen my daddy?), leaving the future Fascist to cling to his devout, bourgeois Catholic mother.

Like most dictators, Franco wound up running his beloved Motherland into the ground. But it wasn't meant to turn out that way.

In launching his coup against Spain's anti-Catholic government in 1936, Franco's goal had been to restore España to its glory days as a global power, adopting the 'Catholic Monarchs' who founded the Inquisition as his role models.

The Last Crusade: Fascist propaganda from the Civil War
Franco vowed to make Spain the 'Spiritual Guide of the World'

The Fascists aimed to bring about not just a political and economic revolution, but also a moral one, rejecting liberalism—particularly the relativism of Rousseau—and restoring the Church to the center of Spanish life.

Decadent Italy and the Vatican might be the Pope's home, but Franco's Spain aimed to implement the purest form of Catholicism on the planet.

And right from the beginning, sex was a weapon.

Seville was one of the first cities to fall to Franco's coupmongers, and the officer who conquered it bragged about the rapes committed by his troops.

For men who viewed women as either virgins or whores, of course, violating a godless Communist wasn't really rape at all: she was already a whore.

After the war, these false ideals became the focus of the Fascist regime.

'In the Spain of National-Catholicism, the accent on immorality fell almost exclusively on sexual sin, so much so that the multiple forms of theft and corruption were forgotten,' according to a fascinating history of Sexual Repression in Franco's Spain, which argues that 'the autarchy's sexual repression also had its Torquemada:' the Minister of Information and Tourism, a 'super-Catholic' who supposedly kept fiscal accounts of how many souls the Fascist regime saved each year.

Spanish Civil War poster:
'Avoid venereal diseases: They're as dangerous as enemy bullets'

The History of Sex: Seville -- Was the Original Don Juan Gay? -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 9)

Other men like Moliere and Mozart quickly turned the Latin lover into a universal archetype, but there were specific reasons why Don Juan premiered in Inquisition Spain, where sex was literally a matter of life and death.

As in the rest of Europe, the ancient Roman rules about shame and honor had never really died out; if anything, they'd probably been crystallized by eight centuries of Islamic rule, particularly in the Moorish south.

'There is in Seville a class of useless, idle people usually known as men about town,' wrote the novelist Cervantes, a man who'd done time in the city's jail himself before giving the world that other product of Inquisition Spain, Don Quixote.

One of these gadabout sevillanos was just a toddler when Tirso de Molina's play made its debut in Madrid, but he grew up to embody the stereotypical Don Juan.

Fortunately, Miguel de Mañara's life had a happy ending.

Staggering home through the Old Town one night, he bumped into a funeral procession.

De Mañara snuck a peek at the corpse—and saw his own dead face staring back at him (other versions claim his wife's death straightened him out).

De Mañara forsook his sinful ways, gave his riches to the poor and genuinely became a force for good. 

However, the more likely real-life inspiration for Don Juan met a sticky end.

THE 'REAL' DON JUAN?

The Count of Villamediana—Don Juan de Tassis y Peralta—was murdered in Madrid in 1622, having offended so many people with his satirical poems that his killer was never caught.

One theory is that Villamediana had peeved the king by consorting with the queen.

But a far more intriguing theory maintains that the 'real Don Juan' wasn't a ladies' man at all.

Now, as with the rumors about 'Osman' in Istanbul, the homosexualization of historical figures is practically a cottaging industry in its own right. In modern life, you're no one until you've been outed in death.

Still, the 'Gay Don Juan' story is a good 'un: according to this conspiracy theory, Villamediana was killed while riding in his coach with a teenager who was also a relative of the king's right-hand man.

What's more, shortly after Villamediana's demise, the Inquisition seems to have found evidence linking the count's household to a ring of homosexuals: two of his servants were burnt as sodomites, alongside a duke's page, a black slave… and a 'pet dwarf.'

Not this dwarf: a court buffoon from around 1626

Unfortunately, this account is based on research dug up by a Spanish historian over three centuries later, in 1928.

When a British successor, Robert Stradling, tried to find the same source material in the archives in 1986, he discovered that 'the papers had vanished:'

'The evidence had been removed, evidently by an authority… concerned to preserve intact the myth of Don Juan. A gay Don Juan evidently threatened the integrity of every Spanish male, even the identity of Spain itself. It had to remain a state secret. I had encountered a case of cultural cover-up.'

Or an administrative cock-up.

But Stradling is convinced—in italics—that if the 1928 account was accurate, 'no doubt can exist that the accepted prototype of Don Juan, most potent of all myths of heterosexual male seduction, was a promiscuous homosexual.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Seville -- Tricksters and Conquistadors -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 8)

Though prone to corruption, a devil's advocate could argue that the Inquisition served as a check on decadence during Spain's 'Golden Century.'

Even after England thrashed the Spanish Armada in 1588, Spain ranked as a global superpower, with vast territories encompassing Latin America, the Caribbean, Florida, California and the southwestern US (without forgetting the Philippines).

The Spanish Inquisition also influenced fashion throughout Europe, though Continentals eventually ditched the rich-but-dour look for more revealing styles (even as the Spanish bizarrely took to binding their daughters' chests with lead plates to make their breasts 'as flat as a sheet of paper,' according to a French contemporary).

At the same time, Spain popularized the Cult of the Virgin, forcing women back up on an even higher pedestal.

Seville still prides itself on being MUY MARIANA: VERY MARIAN.

At least two centuries before the Vatican made it official, the home of Don Juan touted Mary's Immaculate Conception, a doctrine that took the concept of female purity to the extreme: not only had the Mother of God been an eternal virgin, she'd also been conceived sans original sin.

NONCONFORMISTS VS. CONQUISTADORS

Crucially, the riches that made this age 'Golden' for Spain weren't so much earned as stolen, with the conquistadors taking far more from the New World than they put in.

Consider the settlers of New England versus New Spain.

The former were Calvinist nonconformists who risked their lives for an ideal: to be able to practice their beliefs free from religious persecution.

In contrast, the semi-literate brutes who conquered 'New Spain' (like the English fortune-seekers who settled the American South) risked their lives solely to get rich or die trying.

The mountains of gold and silver they shipped back via Seville fostered generations of aristos with no real purpose but to waste their fortunes and amuse themselves by exploiting others.

It's this decadence that produced the character of Don Juan.

Miguel de Manara, often cited as the 'real' Don Juan

The original Trickster of Seville was a straight, wages-of-sin cautionary tale, penned around 1630 by Tirso de Molina, a monk turned playwright.

Don Juan Tenorio is a rich young blade who gets his kicks tricking women into bed.

Catholic to the core, he seduces and double-crosses his way from Naples to Seville, cynically boasting that he'll seek God's forgiveness with his last breath.

The supernatural twist is that the ghost of a man he's murdered—the father of a dishonored woman—kills Don Juan and drags him off to hell before he can repent.

The History of Sex: Seville -- The Bible's Saucy Bits -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 7)

To their credit, Torquemada and Co. also cracked down on the clergy.

According to one expert on the Inquisition, of the 1,735 cases tried by the Tribunal of Barcelona between 1578 and 1635, nineteen percent were for crimes by the clergy.

In Seville, a priest was prosecuted in 1603 for claiming that sodomy wasn't a sin so long as you paid your partner—something he often did while alone with boys in confession.

In fact, complaints about predatory priests were a major reason for the invention of the confessional as we know it: a box that physically separated priests from penitents.

One noteworthy case involved a monk and the most erotic book in the Bible (which, not coincidentally, is also one of its shortest).

In 1572, an Augustinian was hauled up in Valladolid for having translated The Song of Solomon into Spanish.

An auto da fe in front of the Cathedral of Valladolid
in the Covent Garden Opera's production of Don Carlo

Of course, the Church frowned on allowing commoners to interpret the Word of God for themselves, but Fray Luis de León had actually translated the raciest bits into language that any fornicator could understand.

Even some of the translation-happy 'heretics' of Geneva had taken issue with The Song of Solomon and declarations of love such as:

'Your breasts (are) like clusters of fruit… I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.'

Curiously, De León told the Inquisition that he'd translated these fruity passages as a favor for a nun.

However, his cleaner—a fellow monk—found the work in his room and copied it in secret.

The Spanish Song of Solomon soon began circulating as religious samizdat, spreading to Portugal and as far away as Peru.

De León eventually got off with a warning—after five years in jail.

* * *

The History of Sex: Seville -- Sodomy and the Abominable Sin -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 6)

Forever in search of new kindling, the Inquisition soon expanded its remit to sex crimes.

And the Spanish were definitely sexually active.

An English traveler was probably exaggerating when he claimed that 'for fornication and impurity they are the worst of all nations.'

Notably, though, he made that remark having already visited Naples.

The Inquisition judged sexual mores based on the ancient Stoic-Christian rule of thumb: any sex act that couldn't produce a baby was a sin 'against nature.'

So sodomy among men was 'the abominable sin'—classed with bestiality.

Spank me!
In this cartoon by Bosch, birds fly out of a sodomite's bum
while a buffoon spanks him with a lute
-- a symbol of lust
(University of Seville website)

Girl-on-girl action was sinful but largely overlooked because no sperm was wasted—unless, of course, the rubbing got out of hand and the women 'wanted to be more masculine than nature permitted.'

In one case in Seville, two lovers were sentenced to 200 lashes and exile for using a strap-on dildo made of sheepskin.

ONCE YOU HAVE BACK...

In the main, though, male sodomites caught the worst of it because the authorities believed that once you got a taste for anal sex, only the flames could cure you: once you had back, you never went back.

A Jesuit confessor in Seville's prison documented 114 prosecutions for sodomy over thirty-eight years, including the tragic case of two mule drivers who were passing through the city when one of them fell ill.

His co-worker found him in bed in the tavern and asked him what was wrong.

'Close the door,' the man replied, explaining that that he'd taken a dodgy purgative that left him with 'abrasions on his secret bits.'

So his friend sat down on the bed to inspect his sores. 

'For God's sake, don't hurt me!' the patient yelped.

Unfortunately, a maid had been snooping on them through the keyhole.

And when she saw the one man sit on the bed between the other's naked legs—'Don't hurt me!'—she ran to inform the authorities.

The men were tortured until they confessed and were burnt to death for a crime they hadn't committed.

The History of Sex: Seville -- The Church of Me, Myself, and I -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 5)

The Holy Office of the Inquisition got its start in Seville in 1478 after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella—the self-styled 'Catholic Monarchs'—became convinced that their newly united kingdom needed to be saved from fake converts to Christianity: namely, closet Jews and Muslims.

Conveniently, the men who convinced them were Dominicans, members of the order that had been founded by a saintly Spaniard but later racked up loads of expertise on How to Persecute Your Opponents.

The so-called 'Dogs of God' had burned the Cathars into oblivion two centuries earlier, and armed with the same how-to manuals on terror and interrogation, they resolved to do the same to heretics in Spain.

What's more, as Protestantism spread throughout Europe—with its very own 'Rome' in Geneva!—Spain's 'Modern' Inquisition increasingly served as an inspiration for the Catholic fightback known as the Counter-Reformation.

Detail from The Inquisition Tribunal by Goya

To be fair, just as Luther and Calvin had good reasons for reforming the Church, Rome's backlash wasn't just about preserving its earthly perqs.

Devout Catholics must have divined that once you start attacking the foundations of any institution, there's a danger the whole edifice will come tumbling down.

In that sense, the crisis in England was a warning of things to come, with a cretin like Henry VIII—as debauched as any Borgia—personally denouncing Luther yet setting himself up as the pope of his very own breakaway 'Protestant' church and murdering his wives because he couldn't father a healthy son.

It was even more perverse that the English should celebrate him as a jolly rogue—or at worst, a sympathetic monster—rather than a woman-killing tyrant.

And if King Harry could break away, it was just a matter of time before every Tom-and-Dick Commoner would end up worshiping at their own Churches of Me, Myself and I.

So for followers of the old faith, heresy had to be stamped out.

Like its European, Portuguese, American, and even Goan imitators, the Spanish Inquisition was so complex that historians still can't agree on body counts or how universally its diktats were applied.

At best, it seems to have tolerated transgressions so long as you didn't brag about them.

At worst, it fostered a culture of spying and informing on your neighbours, torturing and murdering innocents, and then stealing their estates to feed the killing machine.

As one man put it, 'if the Inquisitors don't burn, they don't eat.'

The History of Sex: Seville -- Home of the Spanish Inquisition... and Don Juan -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 4)

So our thrifty anti-hero decides to change his luck with women by tanning himself 'dark as a Zulu,' switching to contacts, depilating and sculpting his body, learning how to dance and perfecting his 'devastating smile:' 

'Simply put, I was adorable.'

And I can vouch for that, having marveled at his author's photos and online videos, revealing a guy so cute, he probably poos curlicues.

In fact, as muy macho as he and his manicured brethren no doubt are, whenever I read about these avowed womanizers, I can't help but wonder if their braggadocio isn't a form of protesting too much.

I reckon it's only a matter of time before one of these DIY Don Juans, these 'polyamorous' young men comes out and confesses, 'Y'know, what? I actually prefer taking it up the bum—and I don't mean with a strap-on dildo.'

Funnily enough, there's also a theory that the real-life inspiration for Don Juan liked men more than women, a notion so offensive to Spanish masculinity that it supposedly inspired a governmental cover-up (though Don Juan did make his debut around the same time that Castilian dandies adopted their lisp).

However, the main shock for me is that Spain's famed lotharios would need a 'Bible for seduction' at all.

Are Western men so maladjusted that even Spanish ladykillers need help?

* * * 

The modern capital of Andalusia is loud and proud about being the fictional home of a murderous heartbreaker, but Seville is uncharacteristically quiet about a far more important fact from its history.

Up until the opening of a museum on the subject, you could live there for years without stumbling across the city's dirty secret.

But it's true: the city of orange blossoms, flamenco and Don Juan was also the home of the Spanish Inquisition.

And being Torture HQ was no small thing.

Next to the Reconquest—the epic battle to expel the Moors from their last foothold in Western Europe—the Inquisition was one of the institutions (if not the institution) that made Spain and the Spanish what they are today, uniting the country religiously and politically for more than three-and-a-half centuries until a succession of foreign rulers finally put a stop to it.

The Spanish Inquisition was effectively a law unto itself, setting the moral code for Spain and a precedent for the rest of the globe, from Europe to Latin America and even Asia.

As one of the world's great powers, Inquisition Spain cemented the link between sex and sin (if not death) in Catholic culture and revived the virgin-whore dichotomy, exporting all these beliefs via Columbus and the conquistadors.

Importantly, the home of the Inquisition became the gateway to the New World; paradoxically, it also produced 'the world's greatest lover:' Don Juan.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Torture in the Protestant Rome -- (Chap. V, Pt. 7)

However, several other cases ended in death, including that of another Frenchwoman named Anne and her manservant.

Anne Le Moine must have been middle-aged when she took up with Antoine Cossonex, who was a particularly nasty piece of work: not only was he arrested for adultery, but also incest, for he'd allegedly molested her daughter at the same time.

With the teenager testifying against Antoine, and the alleged lovers stonewalling the court, the authorities resorted to torture to extract a confession, sanctioning the estrapade.

L'estrapade (aka strappado) is more commonly associated
with the Inquisitions of Rome than with the "Protestant Rome"

After tying his hands and feet behind his back, Antoine's interrogators would have winched him into the air with a rope and pulley, then let him drop just short of the floor, the successive jolts wrenching his joints and dislocating his shoulders.

Antoine quickly cracked and confessed that he'd been fornicating with Anne for eight months, sometimes twice in one day and 'even in the bed of the master.'

He also admitted far more than they needed to know: it turned out Anne had given him a love token—a gift-wrapped tuft of pubic hair.

Antoine repaid her devotion by trying to rape her daughter, admitting to his torturers that he'd groped the teen's breasts and genitals and rubbed his penis against her.

DAMNED WITH ALL THE DEVILS

Anne made matters even worse under torture.

Instead of simply confessing and pleading for mercy, she adopted the (plainly insane) tack of wild defiance, cursing her husband, the court and no doubt Calvin himself, while also adding blasphemy to her rap sheet.

One account says she screamed that 'she wanted to be damned with all the devils to the deepest depths of hell (and) that she hoped to spend eternity with them at the bottom of the abysmal lake.'

Alas, she didn't get her wish with Lake Geneva, but she did end up in the River Rhone.

The court was so appalled by both lovers that they were put to death the next day: Anne was drowned and Antoine beheaded, a gender distinction that seems to have been common in Europe, possibly because drowning was somehow thought to be a more humane form of execution for 'the weaker sex.'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Protesting Too Much?: From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 1)

Chapter Five

PROTESTING TOO MUCH?

From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' in Geneva 

'Twice a week is the woman's due.
Makes in a year twice fifty-two.' 

--ex-monk Martin Luther, the 'Father of the Reformation,' advising husbands on how to keep their wives happy, c1530 

At the same time that Renaissance men were turning Venice into the world's porn capital, a greater threat to Rome was gathering force on the far side of the Alps.

Whether it was Martin Luther getting hitched to a nun or Henry VIII getting rid of his wives, sex played a crucial role in the world-changing split between Catholics and Protestants.

Though mainly a spiritual movement, this other cultural 'Re-Birth' also focused on matters of the flesh: particularly the age-old debate about celibacy.

By establishing a rival 'City of God' on earth, the Reformation ended up revolutionizing sexual mores around the world, paving the way for gender equality and creating laws on marriage, divorce and sex crimes that survive to this day.

In 1510, a provincial German monk hiked 850 miles across the Alps during winter to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.

Martin Luther soon returned disillusioned, not least because of the sexual hypocrisy he'd seen in the home of his Mother Church.

St. Peter's was on the verge of being rebuilt in the glorious incarnation we know today, financed partly by the proceeds from prostitution.

Sixtus IV, the man who commissioned the Sistine Chapel (hence its name), had also been the first Pope to tax prostitutes (and sanction the Spanish Inquisition).

And when that still wasn't enough, the Vatican stepped up its sale of indulgences, effectively doubling its money on whoremongers.

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Total Eclipse of All Values? -- (Chap. III, Pt. 13)

Serves the Church right, you may think. 

And sure enough, this massive reversal could be karmic—or even Christian, with Catholicism finally reaping what it's sown.

But if the Church dies out in France (and Europe), I can't help but wonder what will come next.

Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, famously declared God dead (and subsequently lost his mind), but also warned that the spiritual void would lead to 'wars the likes of which have never been seen on earth' followed by 'the total eclipse of all values.'

So I've traveled to Toulouse, the hometown of the Inquisition, to meet a priest who's witnessed a bit of both in his eighty-five years on earth.

A BEAUTIFUL CONCEPT

Father Yves Denis was born after World War One and took his vow of celibacy as a priest after World War Two.

I meet him just around the corner from the cathedral, where Guirdham's past-life lover was supposedly held against her will.

For me, it's been so long since I've talked with a priest, I feel awkward, not least in asking Father Denis about his avowed lack of a love life.

Before coming here, I tried to bone up on celibacy, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd forgotten why Rome adopted it in the first place.

Somehow, I'd absorbed the conventional view that celibacy was the Church's way of keeping its men in check—literally holding them by the privates.

The last time I went to Mass, with Lena the Latin South African, I kept thinking of the bearded, bespectacled priest in the pulpit as a sexual misfit at best; either way, he seemed, well, less than a man. How could someone who's never had sex possibly relate to me? 

After refreshing my memory on the subject, though, I can assure you that apart from the no-sex bit, celibacy is a beautiful concept.

Apart from the no-sex bit.

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Christian v. Christian Crusade -- (Chap. III, Pt. 10)

By 1209, the Church decided it had to act.

A Pope with an ironic name—Innocent III—launched the West's first Christian-v-Christian Crusade, giving his blessing to a blood-and-guts campaign by the French king and his northern allies, who were more than happy to steal the land of the lords who harbored heretics.

Cathars being driven out of Carcassonne in 1209

In one infamous episode, the town of Béziers was sacked and its 20,000 inhabitants slaughtered at the behest of a monk who reputedly ordered: 'Kill them all, God will know his own.'

The Church followed up the Albigensian Crusade by inventing an even more insidious institution that would terrorize Catholic Europe (and the New World) for centuries to come.

Based in Toulouse, the Pope entrusted the Inquisition to the rabidly loyal Dominicans, pitting the so-called 'Dogs of God' against the supposed cat kissers.

St. Dominic himself had got his start trying to win back Cathar sympathizers with open-air debates and preach-offs against the Perfects.

In this preach-off, the books of St. Dominic and the Cathars were thrown into the fire--
guess whose miraculously survived
(Pedro Berruguete, 1480)

To his credit, the Spaniard had realized that one of the Cathars' key selling points was that they lived simply, like Christ himself, so he tried to copy them, traveling throughout the south of France as a dirt-poor preacher. Even so, he didn't have much success.

His successors, in contrast, opted to use force.

HUMAN BONFIRES

In 1234, the Dominican Bishop of Toulouse had just finished saying mass in honor of the newly canonized St. Dominic when he received a tip-off that a dying woman in the city had requested the final sacrament from a Cathar.

So he and his friars responded like good, medieval Catholics: they marched to her house, had her carried to a meadow, and burned her alive on her deathbed.

They then returned to their convent, gave thanks to God and St. Dominic, and 'fell cheerfully upon the food set before them.'

The human bonfires raged for decades, but the Cathars were effectively defeated when their last major safe haven fell in 1244.

Unfortunately, the fortress of Montsegur wasn't as secure as its name implied.

After surrendering, the surviving Perfects were led to a clearing at the base of the mountain and burned en masse—all 220 of them.

By the end of the century, the Cathars had been wiped out and most of Languedoc annexed to the north, creating the forerunner of the modern French nation while destroying the culture that first linked France with romance.

The last troubadour died in 1294, lamenting that 'I have come into the world too late.'

Montsegur: the Cathars' last stand

* * *