"Of the sectaries who shared the errors of Gnosticism and Manichæism and opposed the Catholic Church and her hierarchy, the Albigenses were the most thorough and radical. Their errors were, indeed, partly Gnostic and partly Manichæan, but the latter was the more prominent and fully developed. They received their name from a district of Languedoc, inhabited by the Albigeois and surrounding the town of Albi. They are called Cathari and Patarini in the acts of the Council of Tours (A. D. 1163), and in those of the third Lateran, Publiciani (i. e., Pauliciani). Like the Cathari, they also held that the evil spirit created all visible things." _Johannes Baptist Alzog, Manual of Universal Church History, period 2, epoch 2, part 1, chapter 3, section 236. https://archive.org/details/manualofuniversa02alzo_ "The imputations of irreligion, heresy, and shameless debauchery, which have been cast with so much bitterness on the Albigenses by their persecutors, and which have been so zealously denied by their apologists, are probably not ill founded, if the word Albigenses be employed as synonymous with the words Provençaux or Languedocians; for they were apparently a race among whom the hallowed charities of domestic life, and the reverence due to divine ordinances and the homage due to divine truth, were often impaired, and not seldom extinguished, by ribald jests, by infidel scoffings, and by heart-hardening impurities. Like other voluptuaries, the Provençaux (as their remaining literature attests) were accustomed to find matter for merriment in vices which would have moved wise men to tears. But if by the word Albigenses be meant the Vaudois, or those followers (or associates) of Peter Waldo who revived the doctrines against which the Church of Rome directed her censures, then the accusation of dissoluteness of manners may be safely rejected as altogether calumnious, and the charge of heresy may be considered, if not as entirely unfounded, yet as a cruel and injurious exaggeration." _Sir J. Stephen, Lectures on the History of France, lecture 7._ ALSO IN _L. Mariotti, Frà Dolcino and his Times._ See, also, Paulicians, and Catharists. ALBIGENSES: A. D. 1209. The First Crusade.