Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this land, with its intimate ties to the still-Arabized Christian courts of Catalonia and Aragon, had been the breeding ground of a whole stable of institutional misfits. This was the native land of the first generation of poets who attempted to replace Latin as a literary language with the vernacular that within a few years would be poetically dubbed langue d'oc, 'the language of yes,' by Dante Alighieri in no-so-far-off Florence, and it was also the seat of the Jewish mystics and esotericists we call kabbalists. Culturally they were much like their Andalusian brethren, but spiritually they were at odds with the Andalusians' intellectual and philosophical visions of faith. This 'land of yes' seemed to specialize in nay-saying, and it was also the breeding ground of the Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy, the resolutely Manichean 'Church of the Purified' that Rome began to come down on heavily by the mid-twelfth century. The Cathars in their fortified Languedoc towns were the object of an all-out, papally sanctioned Crusade at almost the exact moment that the pan-Christian armies were helping the Christians of Spain destroy the Almoravids."