Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester
Simon de Montfort led the Albigensian crusade and made a lordship out of it. He was a middling French baron with a claim to the earldom of Leicester that the English crown would not honour, and he had been on the Fourth Crusade and had left it in disgust when it turned on Zara. The crusade against the Cathars of Languedoc was called by Innocent III in 1209 after a papal legate was murdered, and its first act was the sack of Béziers, where the whole population of some 15,000 was killed and a Cistercian abbot is reported — in a source written decades later — to have told the soldiers to kill them all and let God sort them out. Montfort was elected commander after that and took the leadership of a war that lasted the rest of his life. He was an extremely capable soldier and utterly without moderation: the defenders of Bram had their eyes put out and their noses cut off and were sent to the next town led by a man left with one eye, and about 140 people were burned at Minerve. He beat Peter II of Aragon at Muret in 1213 with a fraction of his numbers, which brought most of Languedoc under him. He was killed besieging Toulouse in 1218 by a stone from a trebuchet reportedly worked by the women of the town. His son transferred the conquests to the French crown. His son of the same name went to England, married the king's sister, led the barons against Henry III, and summoned the parliament of 1265 that included elected burgesses. The two are regularly confused, and the second is commemorated in the American House of Representatives as a founder of representative government.
- Lived: 1208 CE – 1265 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: politician, military_leader
