THERE’S nothing like a dose of medieval barbarism to give you a hearty appetite.  Under the noonday sun, I was scrambling up a rugged mountain trail toward four stone towers called the Châteaux de Lastours, each one perched on a perilous crag, when it struck me that I should have had more than a croissant and café au lait for breakfast. Of course, access was never meant to be easy.  Eight hundred years ago, these castles in Languedoc, a region of vineyards and olive groves that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Pyrenees in the southwest corner of France, were hideouts of the Cathars, a zealous religious sect that denounced many basic tenets of the Catholic Church. Pope Innocent III was alarmed by the Cathars’ growing popularity, so in 1208 he declared a crusade to eradicate them.  Waves of cross-bearing warriors from northern France and Germany obeyed the holy call, laying siege to Cathar strongholds, slaughtering the heretics and pillaging their lands with a savagery that was startling even by the standards of the Middle Ages. In Béziers, at the northern edge of resistance, over 15,000 men, women and children  the entire population of the town as well as hordes of hapless refugees  were butchered. (The crusader monk Armond Amaury famously told his troops, when asked whom to spare, “Kill them all, God will know his own.”)  Here at the isolated Lastours castles, which were built along a defensive cliff spur, the Cathars spent much of 1209 heroically fending off the onslaught. So the crusader leader, the sadistic Simon de Montfort, resorted to primitive psychological warfare. He ordered his troops to gouge out the eyes of 100 luckless prisoners, cut off their noses and lips, then send them back to the towers led by a prisoner with one remaining eye.  This macabre parade only hardened the Cathars’ resistance, and they lasted until 1211 before capitulating. One by one, the other Cathar towns and strongholds fell to the sword. By 1229 the heresy was largely crushed, and the semi-independent counties of Languedoc, which had harbored it, had succumbed to French rule.  Dramatic stuff, you might say, but it’s hard to visualize these grisly images when surrounded by such seductive mountain scenery. How could this frenzied cruelty have occurred under the same pearly blue sky where the breeze brings the perfume of wildflowers? The main Cathar sites of Languedoc are now part of the 10,570-square-mile modern French region of Languedoc-Roussillon, whose spectacular gorges, rivers, forests and thermal springs make it today one of the country’s most popular summer destinations  a place where Parisians can be found hiking, swimming and savoring the excellent wine. In fact, on a sunny day, it comes as no surprise to learn that, at the same time as the crusade, Languedoc’s many troubadours were creating some of the most enduring love poetry of the Middle Ages.  After a 15-minute climb along the exposed hillside, I clambered inside each of the four stark castles of Lastours, which lie about 100 yards apart and have been rebuilt and restored. I made my way up spiral stone staircases and peered through ancient arrow slits and ceiling gaps  nicknamed murder holes  through which defenders dropped rocks and poured boiling oil.  And yet (perhaps like the happy troubadours) my mind too began to wander from the tragic Cathar saga to more immediate sensual pleasures. I couldn’t help remembering that in the tidy village of Lastours, where the steep trail had begun and where I had parked my car some 900 feet below, a very promising cafe had been putting out tables on a terrace beside the burbling River Orbiel. Instead of concentrating on medieval war crimes, I flashed back to the cafe’s blackboard, which reminded me that there was a fresh salad Niçoise in the offing. And so, surrendering to the inevitable, I tumbled back down the trail to this cafe, which turned out to be a casual annex of a renowned Michelin-starred restaurant called Le Puits du Trésor  more promising still.  As I took my first sip of crisp white Vin de Pays d’Oc, I did feel a twinge of guilt for the valiant heretics, many of whom were devoutly austere. The Cathars believed that the world had been created by a force of darkness and heaven by God, and that all earthly activity was tainted and sinful. Aspiring only to the purity of early Christianity, they were appalled by the worldliness of the medieval papacy and its debauched clerics.  TONY PERROTTET is the author, most recently, of Pagan Holiday and Napoleons Privates.
In southwestern France, castles that were once the hideouts of the heretical Cathars now sit among vineyards and olive groves.