Ruined Cathar fortress perched nearly 4,000 feet above the Pyrenean valley floor. The last stronghold of the Cathar faith fell after a ten-month siege in 1244, but Inquisition records confirm that treasure was smuggled out before the surrender, and two men were lowered by rope down the precipice on the night over 200 Cathars were burned alive.
About This Site
Montségur sits on a limestone ridge in the French Pyrenees so steep that in places the castle walls and the cliff are the same thing. For the Cathars, the dualist Christian faith that Rome spent thirty years trying to eradicate through the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition, this fortress served as spiritual capital, treasury, and final refuge. By 1243 the Cathar church had been driven underground across the Languedoc, and Montségur was the last place where its leaders could gather openly.
In May 1243, a force of roughly ten thousand soldiers representing the French crown and the Catholic Church laid siege to the castle. Inside were fewer than four hundred people: soldiers, civilians, and the last senior figures of the Cathar faith. The siege dragged on for ten months through a harsh mountain winter. By early 1244, the garrison was starving and the defences were failing. Surrender terms were negotiated: those who renounced Catharism could leave. Those who refused would burn.
On March 16, 1244, over two hundred Cathars who refused to recant were led into a wooden stockade at the base of the mountain and burned alive. The site is still marked today by a memorial stele in the field known as the Prat dels Cremats, the Field of the Burned.
But the Inquisition records preserved in the DOAT collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France tell a more complex story. Before the surrender, two Cathar perfects named Mathieu and Pierre Bonnet smuggled out gold, silver, and what the Latin record calls "pecuniam infinitam," an infinite quantity of money. They hid it in caves in the Sabarthès region, on lands held by Pons Arnaud de Châteauverdun. Then, on the night of the mass burning, the fortress commander Pierre Roger de Mirepoix hid two more men inside the walls: Amiel Aicard and his companion Hugh de Villiers. After the pyres had burned, the two were lowered by rope down the sheer precipice beneath the castle. Witnesses traced their route through Caussou and Prades to the Castle of Usson, where they met Mathieu, the man who had hidden the monetary treasure weeks earlier.
The Inquisition interrogation of Arnaud Roger de Mirepoix records the reason explicitly: "And this was done so that the Church of the heretics would not lose its treasure, which was hidden in the woods." Neither Hugh de Villiers nor the Cathar treasure was ever found.
Connection to Oak Island
The escape of Hugh de Villiers from Montségur in 1244 is the earliest documented instance of a pattern that connects directly to Oak Island. The De Villiers family of the Languedoc were Templar patrons who had donated their own castle at Pieusse to the Knights Templar in 1137. They were also Cathar sympathisers who hosted a synod of over a hundred Cathars in 1225. Hugh's brother Jourdain de Villiers had participated in the raid on Avignonet in 1242, in which Cathar fighters killed two Dominican inquisitors and returned to Montségur with documents and valuables. The family straddled both the Templar and Cathar worlds simultaneously.
Sixty-three years after Hugh de Villiers vanished from Montségur with the Cathar treasure, another man bearing the same name, Hugues de Châlons (identified by historian E.-G. Léonard as "probably identical" with Hugh de Villiers, preceptor of Épailly), fled Paris on the eve of the Templar arrests in October 1307 carrying the entire treasury of the Visitor of the Knights Templar. He was escorted by Gérard de Villiers, Master of France, the highest-ranking Templar on French soil, who led fifty horses out of the city while eighteen galleys put to sea. Same family name, same role, same outcome: escape with the treasure, followed by silence.
The De Villiers line continued through the Knights Hospitaller, producing Philippe de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Grand Master during the fall of Rhodes in 1522, and eventually Catherine de Villiers, whose son Isaac de Razilly arrived on the coast of Nova Scotia in 1632 as a Knight Commander of the Order of Malta. Razilly established himself at La Hève, roughly twenty kilometres from Oak Island, and in 1635 requested that the Order of Malta purchase lands in Acadia to found a Priory. The pattern set at Montségur, a De Villiers present at the moment of crisis, trusted with what is most precious, and disappearing into silence, continued for nearly five centuries.
Fieldwork Notes
Marty Lagina and Alex Lagina visited Montségur during Season 2 of The Curse of Oak Island (Episode 6, "Seven Must Dye"), accompanied by author Kathleen McGowan. McGowan presented her theory that treasure originally held at Montségur was eventually moved to Oak Island, connecting the Cathar refuge to the broader network of medieval sites linked to the island. The team climbed the mountain to the castle ruins and examined the site where the Cathar treasure was believed to have been kept before the siege. From Montségur, the group continued to Rennes-le-Château and Alet-les-Bains, tracing a route through southern France that connected Cathar and Templar history to the Oak Island mystery.
Gallery
![Item. I heard Bernard Guilhem and Bernard d'Auvezines, the perfects, say in the place where I was keeping watch with them, that the perfects Amiel Aicard and Hugh [de Villiers] had been taken out of the castle of Montségur with a rope down the precipice under Pierre-Roger's castle, in the night of the day when the castle was delivered into the hands of the King and Church. Asked about who took these parfaits out of the castle: I don't know. (Languedoc DOAT XXIV, p81)](/uploads/site-gallery-124-1771441618-0.webp)
