Final Project #3

It is hard to imagine what Simon of Montfort thought about the Cathar Wars. He must have encountered many problems when it came to things simply as supplying his army. Supplying soldiers was much more difficult during the Middle Ages than it is now. There was no modern machinery back then to make supply the army fast an efficient. Also, organization would have been much more difficult without modern electronics to virtually store all of the necessary information. Finding out how much you had to pay each individual person, who leaves the army when and all these other small things which aren't too difficult for us to do today would have been extremely difficult to do back then. The most important part of General Montfort's job would have been to successfully lead his troops in battle. Attacking such fortresses such as Carcassone would have been very difficult. He would have to know exactly how to position his troops, where the weak points of the enemy defenses are, and how he could best exploit their weaknesses. He must have been an extremely intelligent person and very good with people in order to really a force such as this. His success as a general can probably be attributed to these things as his background. He also must have had really strong feelings against the Cathars. As we could see as we traveled around France, there had but a huge outcry against the Cathars during this time period. His feelings must have been very anti-Cathar, as he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of them. It also must have been difficult for Montfort to tear about southern France, especially when so much of it was inhabited by law-abiding Christians. Nonetheless, he probably also recognized that this was necessary because it was God's will, he believed, for him to destroy the heretics that were the Cathars.