The term "cathar" derives from the Greek word katharos, meaning “pure.” Such purity was the ultimate goal of the Cathars, a religious group that believed the human soul had been imprisoned in flesh and blood to suffer on Earth by an evil god. Catharism was regarded as a heretical religion by the Roman Catholic Church and had thus been exterminated by the late 1300s. In the mid-15th century, the few remaining Cathars fled to Germany, where they were put on trials for alleged crimes of heresy. From these trials could be seen the shadow of the witchcraft craze that would seize Europe for the next 200 years. The origins of catharism are a mystery, though the movement is believed to have emerged in the Byzantine Empire during the 12th century. It spread to Croatia from the Balkans, a Byzantine territory, and eventually to North Italy, the Netherlands, and several German states. The religion especially thrived in southern France, where it was welcomed as a popular alternative to Catholicism. Catharism’s earliest form was likely to have been the Gnostic derivative of Christianity, but there is also the possibility that its roots were Manichaen, an Eastern dualistic religion. The doctrines of Catharism suggest that it was one of the most ancient forms of Christianity, as it retained ancient practices and beliefs that other branches of Christianity had discontinued. In any case, the Catholic Church viewed the Cathars as neo-Manichaens, a group of heretics which Pope Innocent III declared were “worse than the Saracens (1) ” (Coppens, “The Cathars: The Struggle for and of a New Church”). The Cathars believed they were “good Christians” (McDonald, "Cathars and Cathar Beliefs in the Languedoc"), and that the Roman Catholic Church followed corrupted Christian principles that distorted early Christian beliefs. Cathar theology was built on doctrines of Dualism and Gnosticism. The Cathar group believed in the dualistic view of two g