After the not very effectual mission of St. Bernard, who died in 1153, and for half a century, the orthodox Church was several times occupied with the heretics of Southern France, who were before long called Albigensians, either because they were numerous in the diocese of Albi, or because the council of Lombers, one of the first at which their condemnation was expressly pronounced (in 1165), was held in that diocese.  But the measures adopted at that time against them were at first feebly executed, and had but little effect.  The new ideas spread more and more; and in 1167 the innovators themselves held, at St. Felix-de-Caraman, a petty council, at which they appointed bishops for districts where they had numerous partisans.  Raymond vi., who, in 1195, succeeded his father, Raymond V., as Count of Toulouse, was supposed to be favorably disposed towards them; he admitted them to intimacy with him, and, it was said, allowed himself, in respect of the orthodox Church, great liberty of thought and speech.  Meanwhile the great days and the chief actors in the struggle commenced by St. Bernard were approaching.  In 1198, Lothaire Conti, a pupil of the University of Paris, was elected pope, with the title of Innocent iii.; and, four or five years later, Simon, Count of Montfort l’Amaury, came back from the fifth crusade in the East, with a celebrity already established by his valor and his zeal against the infidels.  Innocent iii., no unworthy rival of Gregory VII., his late predecessor in the Holy See, had the same grandeur of ideas and the same fixity of purpose, with less headiness in his character, and more knowledge of the world, and more of the spirit of policy.  He looked upon the whole of Christendom as his kingdom, and upon himself as the king whose business it was to make prevalent everywhere the law of God.  Simon, as Count of Montfort l’Amaury, was not a powerful lord; but he was descended, it was said, from a natural son of King Robert his mother, who was English, had left him heir to the earldom of Leicester, and he had for his wife Alice de Montmorency.  His social status and his personal renown, superior as they were to his worldly fortunes, authorized in his case any flight of ambition; and in the East he had learned to believe that anything was allowed to him in the service of the Christian faith.  Innocent iii., on receiving the tiara, set to work at once upon the government of Christendom.  Simon de Montfort, on returning from Palestine, did not dream of the new crusade to which he was soon to be summoned, and for which he was so well prepared.