ABSTRACT
(From Fearns, no. 10; A. Dondaine (ed.), Liber de duobus principiis (Rome, 1939), pp. 65–70). The author was a Dominican who for seventeen years had been a Cathar, and spoke from knowledge, but also from a very hostile viewpoint. This particularly aífects his list of ‘Cathars’ at the end, which is evidently intended to show how few and scattered they have become. Clearly the numbers refer only to ‘perfecti’, the inner circle of fully committed Cathars, not to adherents or well-wishers; and by 1250 the numbers had been greatly depleted, by crusade and conversion, especially in the south of France. In effect this is a catalogue of the Cathars surviving in north and central Italy, the Balkans and Constantinople. But it is a valuable indication of their distribution and of their earlier centres of influence. Some of the names are obscure: I follow the identifications proposed by A. Dondaine, op. cit. pp. 62–3 and in Archivum Fratrum Praedica- torum, Vol. XX (1950), pp. 234–324, especially pp. 282Íf., in which he suggests that the obscure Albanenses is derived from a personal name, ‘the followers of Albanus’.
