We can say that Gnosticism has survived into the ideology of the Cathars in medieval Europe. The Cathars are already mentioned in the Council of Nicaea in 325, but their great development took place mainly between 1150 and 1250 in France, where often they were called Albigenses by the name of the French city of Albi. The ideology of the Cathars in Europe came from the Holy Land through the Byzantine Empire, but also worn by Knights returning from the Crociate.La doctrine of the Cathars was based on a kind of Gnostic dualism: they professed a doctrine under which the Rex Mundi (King of the world) creator of the material world was opposed to the King of Love, the Father, that Christ was come to make known to mankind. Derived from the doctrine of the Gospel passages in which Jesus said the irreducible opposition between the "Kingdom of Heaven" and the Kingdom of this world and invited the disciples to seek the Kingdom of Heaven.
For the Cathars, the material world was a deception of God the Creator to ensnare the souls of men and distract them from the knowledge of true reality. Like many other Gnostic sects considered objectionable when the sexual act aimed at procreation, because, in this way, the spirit is imprisoned in other living beings. Moreover, they were Docetists, that believed that Jesus was only apparently a mortal body: Like the Gnostics believed that Christ was an Aeon issued by the God of Light.
Cathar doctrine, therefore, was based on oppositions between spirit and matter, between Light and Darkness, between Good and Evil, and on the consideration that all creation was a great catch of a Creator God than to imprison the human soul. So the task of the Human Spirit was to rid the prison of the body of man is reunited with God the Father, which must be fulfilled in life, because, otherwise, the human soul was forced to more reincarnations to reach the final liberation.
The Catholic Church believed the Cathar heresy a dangerous especially as the number of believers of this doctrine grew enormously and France had developed a real Cathar Church, rival of the Church of Rome. In 1208 Pope Innocent III called for a first Albigensian Crusade in France, but despite the great massacre, was not very successful: the Cathars is resumed, or rather their followers continued to increase. It was the "heresy" Cathar to lead the Catholic Church to establish the Tribunal of the Inquisition, and so began the torture and stakes for the Cathars who fell into the hands of the Church. Then the shooting Crusade momentum and began the massacres of the Albigenses (famous to Beziers in which the Crusaders claimed to have exterminated the Cathars a million men, women and children). The last stand of the Cathars was the stronghold of Montsegur in 1244.
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