Historians scarcely know how to speak of these enormities. Sismondi states, that “hundreds of villages had seen all their inhabitants massacred with a blind fury, and without the crusaders giving themselves the trouble to examine whether they contained a single heretic. We cannot tell what credit to give to the numbers assigned for the armies of the cross, nor whether we may believe that, in the course of a single year, five hundred thousand men were poured into Languedoc.” But this we certainly know, that armies, much superior in numbers, and much inferior in discipline, to those which were employed in other wars, had arrived for seven or eight successive years; that they entered this country without pay, and without magazines; that they provided for all their necessities with the sword; that they considered it as their right to live at the expense of the country; and that all the harvests of the peasants, all the provisions and merchandise of the citizens, were on every occasion seized with a rapacious hand, and divided among the crusaders. No calculation can ascertain, with any degree of precision, the dissipation of wealth, or the destruction of human life, which were the consequences of the crusade against the Albigenses. “There was scarcely a peasant who did not reckon in his family some unhappy one cut off by the sword of Montfort’s soldiers. More than three quarters of the knights and landed proprietors had been spoiled of their castles and fiefs, to gratify some of the French soldiers--some of Simon de Montfort’s creatures. Thus spoiled, they were named _Faidits_, and had the favour granted them of remaining in the country, provided they were neither heretics nor excommunicated, nor suspected of having given an asylum to those who were so; but they were never to be permitted to enter a walled city, nor to enjoy the honour of mounting a war-horse. Every species of injustice, all kinds of affronts, persecutions of every name, had been heaped on the heads of the unhappy Languedocians, under the general name of Albigenses.”