Secret tribunals, illegal rendition, torture, trumped up charges ... all in a society controlled by fear. Such was the tenor of life in Languedoc around the year 1300. The dungeons housed hundreds of despairing innocents. The charge - heresy.

Nearly a century had passed since Languedoc had been put to the sword in the Albigensian Crusade, but the stain of Catharism still lay on the land. Any accusation of Catharism invited peril. But repression bred resentment and it was in Carcassonne that resistance began to stir. In 1300 a great orator emerged who brought together the currents of resistance. Three years later the terrible prisons were stormed and the inmates set free. The orator was a Franciscan friar, Bernard Délicieux. The forces ranged against Delicieux included the ruthless Pope Boniface VII, the Machiavellian French King Philip IV and the grand inquisitor of Toulouse Bernard Gui (the villain of The Name of the Rose). This magnificent book, which forms a kind of sequel to Stephen O'Shea's bestselling The Perfect Heresy, tells his inspiring life and tragic story.