That’s a Da Vinci’s Notebook reference–a bit obscure, I know, but too tempting to pass up for The Da Vinci Code’s author, because I have to admit: Dan Brown has balls. The movie was scheduled to premiere in the middle of May, but the trial may delay that. The authors of the original Prieuré de Sion conspiracy book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, are suing, alleging that Brown plagarized them. (Of course, facts can’t be copyrighted, so isn’t this an implicit admission that Holy Blood, Holy Grail is fiction?) Of course, that’s where this niche genre began, all the way back in the misty days of my birth: 1982 Anno Domini. Ever since I first read it almost a decade ago, I’ve had to deal with a new round of this roughly once every two years. Most of the time, it’s a piece of fiction that’s “based on real history!” It’s a lot of other things, too, but to look at one of the most gruesome–and most forgotten–atrocities in European history, and decide that just wasn’t enough–no, you need to defame the victims, too, with the worst insults they could imagine, all the while reducing them to bit characters in a bizarre conspiracy theory, well … that certainly takes muchos huevos grandes.

Most people who take offense at the Holy Blood cottage industry are devout Christians offended by the idea of Jesus having children, like U.S. Catholic bishops responsible for the website, “Jesus Decoded,” aimed at debunking the book. They’re spot on with comments like, “The Da Vinci Code is a mess, a riot of laughable errors and serious misstatements. Almost every page has at least one of each,” which was something I noticed myself with Holy Blood, but the suggestion that Jesus had children is not so outrageous. Neither is it the foregone conclusion that the authors of Holy Blood assert. While it is true that the Talmud does point to Genesis 1:28 as the first mitzvot given by G-d to bear children, this was a ruling first set down centuries after Jesus’ death. Moreover, the Talmudic tradition comes from the Pharisees. If Jesus was a Pharisee, he might have shared this belief. But, as I discussed in a long article on the historical Jesus, “Betraying the Son of Man,” Jesus’ teachings evince a blending of Greek Cynicism with Essenism, and the Essenes were known for intentional celibacy. So, the issue of Jesus’ children is an open one, with good arguments for both sides.

Where Holy Blood goes off into fantasy land is in its argument that the Merovingians–a line of Salian Frankish chiefs–were heirs to Jesus’ line, that the Pope somehow owed the Merovingians something because Clovis (Louis I) was a sufficiently shrewd politician to note the advantages of conversion, and that the rest of Western history is all the story of a feud between the Roman Catholc Church and the secretive Priory of Sion protecting the bloodline of Jesus, with Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau as “Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion,” along with a who’s who checklist made up for freshmen studying for a Western Civilization 101 midterm. As I discussed in the aforementioned article, Jesus’ campaign targeted all the systems of brokerage that organized and ran the ancient world, including the systems of brokerage whereby ordinary people approached “holy men” through their families. Even if we ignore the fact that for three centuries, Christianity was a minor cult and most people would not care who his children were (so they’d most likely be lost to the mist of history), there is still the issue that Jesus distanced himself from his family at many, many occasions (e.g., Mark 3:31-35). The idea that Jesus’ children should enjoy any special status–even if they were not almost immediately dispersed and lost to history, which would itself be most unlikely–is contrary to the primary, fundamental principle of Jesus’ own teachings.

Sometimes (rarely) it makes for good fiction. Gabriel Knight III: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned was the high mark of the genre, as far as I’m concerned, involving not just the infamous locale of Rennes-le-Château and its bizarre church, but vampires and ancient Egyptian cults to boot. And were this all harmless fiction, it might go unremarked. It might even be only slightly exasperating if it were only a bizarre and unfounded conspiracy theory that only highlighted how little the authors understood about medieval history and society. What makes this whole phenomenon so upsetting for me is not just how popular this hogwash is, but of what it does to the Cathars.

The Cathars had some very strange beliefs, but then, that’s only the natural consequence of Johannine theology. The Cathars took the dualism of flesh vs. spirit to its natural conclusion: if the spirit is good and the flesh is evil, then the spiritual is the creation of G-d, and the material comes from the Devil. The G-d of the Old Testament creates the material world, so obviously, that’s the Devil pretending to be G-d, or as Gnostics call him, the Demiurge. Humans are good souls trapped in evil bodies by the Demiurge; the obvious implication, that the Cathars did not shy away from, was that Judaism is devil-worship. The Cathars never got big enough to engage in any significant anti-Semitism, though, because they were more preoccupied with the Roman Catholc Church. Cathar clergy were strictly ascetic perfecti, who provided a sharp and embarrassing contrast to the opulent wealth of the Roman Catholic clergy (though most Cathar took the oath of the perfecti on their death beds, to live a life of asceticism for an average of half an hour). For the Cathar, the greatest sin was conception, because that trapped another good soul within the fleshy prison of Satan’s world, so the Cathars were fairly self-eliminating anyway. They rejected the doctrine of the Incarnation, since a good G-d would never allow himself to be trapped in Satan’s flesh, so Jesus merely took on the appearance of a human body, in order to teach us how to escape the material world and return to the spirit. Thus, the Cathars emphasized the teachings of Jesus, rather than his gruesome death, as the Catholic Church did. For the Cathars, the crucifixion and resurrection was a mere illusion, since G-d had no material body to die and rise again with. The most important sacrament of the medieval world, the Eucharist, was blasphemy to the Cathar; they pointed out that if one were to pile all the host wafers distributed in a single year, it would be a mountain by now–so how could it be the flesh of a single man? At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Catholic Church adopted the doctrine of transubstantiation–the belief that the Eucharist is the literal body and blood of Christ–specifically in response to the Cathars. This is about the time that stories of the Holy Grail begin to circulate secularly, again using the Eucharist as a memetic “weapon” against the heresy.

The Cathars were most influential in the Languedoc, an area that was culturally and socially largely independent of the rest of France then. The Count of Toulouse was very near to declaring independence from Paris. The Languedoc was wealthy and prosperous, unlike the north of France, which was embroiled in turmoil. Most of that wealth and prosperity came from the open tolerance that allowed not only the Cathars to prosper, but also Muslims and Jews, under the auspices of the Trencavel family. Raymond I of Toulouse had been one of the main leaders of the First Crusade. During the siege of Jerusalem, his task was to take the eastern tower, which was being held by the Emir of Egypt. Amidst the bloody butchery and savagery of the other crusaders, the Emir was forced to surrender, but he feared that he would be attacked on his way back to Egypt. So, Raymond took his forces and personally escorted the Emir to the Egyptian border. After Jerusalem fell, the caliph sent a message to the pope, endorsing Raymond for the title of King of Jerusalem, because Raymond had proven himself as a reasonable and honorable man that they could work with on peaceful terms. Instead, one of the bloodiest butchers of the lot, Godfrey de Bouillon, was given the title–and that was why we refer to “Crusades” in the plural.

The Trencavels provide a compelling suggestion that perhaps nobility, in the ethical sense, is hereditary. Raymond VI was Count of Toulouse when the French king decided that he needed to assert his power over the south of France, and that a willing pope and a burgeoning heresy provided just the right pretext. Raymond VI was a very devout Catholic, but he saw his duty to his people as taking precedence. He did an incredibly humiliating penance at Saint Gilles before the pope and the king and suffered every indignity to avert conflict, but he refused to crack down on his own people for believing differently than himself.

In 1209, Pope Innocent III declared the Albigensian Crusade. The Crusade came first to Beziers, where according to legend, the leader of the crusade, the papal legate Arnaud-Amery, was asked, “How can we tell the heretics from the good Catholics?” His famous reply: “Kill them all; G-d will know his own.” The legate did write back, quite gleefully, to the pope about the 15,000 they killed that day–many inside the churches where they flocked for sanctuary.

When they came to Carcassonne, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne, knew what was coming. He offered himself, if only they would allow his people to go. Raymond-Roger eventually died after several months of gruesome torture.

Raymond VI fled to England with his son, Raymond VII, as the Languedoc fell to Simon de Montfort, father of the Simon who fought in the Barons’ War and helped found Britain’s Parliament. This Simon was a bloody and ruthless tyrant who began to root out the Cathar heresy with extreme prejuidice. Tales of the suffering, torture and death Simon brought to the Languedoc reached Raymond VII in England. Raymond VI had died–his final wish, a good, Catholic burial denied to him for the “heresy” of refusing to execute his own people en masse as viciously as Simon now did. Raymond returned to the Languedoc, and raised up a force intent to overthrow Simon and end his tyranny–and so they did, restoring Raymond to the Countship of Toulouse.

Simon de Montfort led the remnants of the original crusade to retake Toulouse, but lost his own life there. Simon’s son, Amaury de Montfort took up the fight, but he, too, was defeated. The king and the church realized that while the Cathars had been only one of the elements in the tapestry of Languedoc’s rich and vibrant culture, the Crusade had united and galvanized all the people, making the Catholic majority quite willing to stand, fight, and even die in defense of the pacifist heretics who still made no move to defend themselves (only at the very end did the perfecti relent to even hiring mercenaries). Another crusade, this one led by King Louis VIII, succeeded through overwhelming force. Raymond was summoned to Paris to discuss terms. Raymond knew it was a trap, but they offered him something he could not refuse as a dutiful son: a good, Catholic burial for his father. He went, and it was a trap. Raymond was tortured for almost a year before he finally died. Toulouse was handed over to a new agency the Church invented then to take up the task the Crusade had failed to execute, calling it the Inquisition, and to this day, Raymond VI remains unburied.

It took several more years for the Catholic Church to finish the bloody job of rooting out the last of the heretics and hacking them to pieces, finally ending with the siege of Montsegur in 1244. It was one of the most bloody atrocities in European history, and largely forgotten in the English-speaking world, even though it was one of the great formative events that created the modern world.

For Holy Blood, the Cathars are bit players in a bizarre conspiracy. As enemies of the Church, they naturally must have been involved in protecting the royal bloodline of Jesus.

For the Cathars, the greatest sin was to concieve and bear children. For the Cathars, Jesus did not even have a physical body. For the Cathars, there is no concievable blasphemy so great as to propose that Jesus had children. For the Cathars, there is no concievable insult so great as to suggest that their role was to protect his lineage.

The Da Vinci Code and the rest of the Holy Blood genre are exasperating not only because of their constant historical inaccuracies and misunderstandings, less still for their downright silly paranoia (that’s probably the closest it has to a redeeming virtue), but most of all, because of the defamation it heaps upon the victims of one of the worst–and most forgotten–acts of genocide in the long, bloody tale of European history.