Cathar Castles
Château de Montségur ( Castèl de Montsegùr)

The Château de Montségur is probably the best known of all Cathar Castles. It is famous as the last Cathar stronghold, which fell after a 10 month siege in 1244. A field below the hill-top castle is reputed to be the site where over 200 Cathars were burned alive, having refused to renounce their faith.

A building on this site sheltered a community of Cathar women at the end of the twelfth century. Early in the thirteenth, Ramon de Pereille the co-seigneur and Chatelaine, was asked to make it defensible, anticipating the problems to come.

It is open to the public, as is a museum in the nearby modern village of Montségur. There is an entrance fee for both.

Getting There: Montségur is in the Ariege, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, not far from Lavelanet, due South from Mirepoix.

Montségur lies at   42°52'35" N,   1°49'51" E on a pog (a volcanic pluton) at an altitude of 1,207 meters. The castle is owned by the Commune of Montségur. There is an entrance fee, which also covers entry to a museum in the nearby town.

Guided Tours
:www://www.citaenet.com/montsegur
guide.montsegur@wanadoo.fr
Tel: 05 61 01 06 94 Fax: 05 61 03 11 27

Mairie: mairie.montsegur@wanadoo.fr
Tel: 05 61 0110 27

Tourist Information Office:
Tel: 05 61 03 03 03

Google map showing Château de Montségur

From 1232 it became the headquarters of the Cathar community in the Languedoc, and a refugee centre for "faidits" - outlaws who had been stripped of their lands and goods by the Roman Church. These faidits, exact counterparts of the more recent maquis, continued to wage a guerilla war against the invaders.

After the failure of the uprising against the French invaders, the defeat of Henry III, King of England by Louis IX of France, the events at Avignonet, and the capitulation of Raymond VII, all in 1243, the Council of Béziers decided to destroy the last vestiges of Catharism. The Cathar sympathisers responsible for killing the Inquisitors at Avignonet were known to have come from Montségur in the the Pyrenees. The Council therefore decided to "cut off the head of the dragon" by which they meant to taking of the château there, the last remaining major centre of Cathar belief. The château, perched on top of a majestic hill (called a pog), had already been reinforced.

The castle was besieged later in 1443 by Hughes des Arcis, Seneschal of Carcassonne for the King of France. For months the siege was unsuccessful but shortly before Christmas a group of Basque mercenaries scaled a seemingly impossible sheer cliff face, and overran a forward position. From here, under the direction of a Catholic bishop specialising in war machines, the French were able to construct catapults.

This spelled the end of all hope. The garrison surrendered on 2 March 1244 having negotiated a truce of two weeks, after which the Parfaits would have to abjure their faith or burn alive.

The story of the siege of Montségur is one of the most moving of all the tragedies associated with the war against the Cathars.  Even the most hostile writers were struck by the significance of events at Montségur, when against expectation the ranks of the doomed Parfaits increased during the two weeks' truce.

The site is spectacular, and well worth a visit.   There are guided tours from February to December.

• You can see the modern village of Montségur from the castle miles below: the photograph on the right shows the view from the castle walls.
• You can see the foundations of some Cathar buildings (the original village of Montségur) behind the present castle, which is of course French.   Despite this, you may well hear experts on the Cathars expounding theories not only that the Cathars built this castle, but that for religious reasons they built it in a perfect alignment with the rising sun.  - perhaps a distorted version of the fact that the keep and and one wall are aligned on a South-east - North-west axis.
• You can get to the donjon (keep) from the outside. Go through the postern gate and turn left.

• Not all castles had drawbridges. Montségur, like many others, had an external doorway far off the ground, with a wooden access ramp that could be removed or destroyed whenever a siege threatened. (See modern counterpart to the right)
• A single loophole (arrow slit) in the wall of the donjon, covers the courtyard.
• You can just see the castle at Puivert from the keep.
• At the bottom of the pog on which the Castle sat is a monument next the the field where 225 Parfait were burned alive.   They were herded into a specially made pen in the early morning of 16th March. They included three generations of one family - Grandmother, Mother and Daughter. People still leave flowers there.  

The French have a word for the act of burning people alive - they call it a Bûché. There is no exact counterpart in English. The nearest we have is burn at the stake. You may see the word translated in some literature as massacre or occasionally left as bûché in English translations.     

A stele (shown right) marks the spot where the Cathars are believed to have been burned alive. Another monument stone by the road reads in French:

The castle was classified as an Historical Monument in 1875.

Many visitors take flowers, usually red and yellow, the colours of Aragon, of Toulouse and of Foix, to whom the victims all owed their allegiance.