Historical accuracy - Languedoc overlorded by Aragon not France pre-Albigensian Crusade

[keirioats]

I've been reading a bit about the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, from what I've been reading it seems like before the Crusade the Languedoc etc were overlorded (all be it very loosely) by the kings of Aragon ratehr than France (hence Aragon's participation in the battle of Muret). Yet in CK2 it seems to be overlorded by France. Have I read things wrong, or is the CK2 map inaccurate?

 

[Voy]

Probably a balance thing.

 

[Olligarchy]

France already gets rekt enough no matter the start that we should go easy on it.

 

[GCRust]

The Kings of Aragon financed the Cathars, mostly because they were a thorn in the side of the French monarchy. Nominal control of the Cathars came from the House of Toulouse, who were functionally independent pre-Crusade.

Indeed, the properties and territories of Toulouse is considered the primary objective of the Albigensian Crusade. At the very least the primary objective of the secular forces under Louis VIII.

 

[ssorgatem]

The CK2 map is quite inaccurate when it comes to the Crown of Aragon.

The current in-game duchies of Aragon, Valencia and Majorca should be "petty" kingdoms, much like the early English and Norse ones, and the made up "duchy of Barcelona" should be the "Principality of Catalonia". And the county of Rosselló should belong to the duchy/kingdom of Majorca (it should actually be its de jure capital; that's where the palace of the kings of Majorca is).

Don't even get me started on cultures, the lack of Aragonese, or how Occitan and Catalan, almost identical during most of the game's timeframe, are in two different culture groups (!) when Catalan should be split from Occitan (like swe-nor-dan from Norse)... and not from Visigothic (which makes very little sense as implemented right now... but it's certainly better than having wildly anachronistic Catalan Denians during the Viking age, as after ToG...).

And how Occitan has almost non-existant cultural names for holdings, not even for their native regions: so Toulousse remains with its French name when held by an Occitan, instead of changing to Tolosa... for most titles they could even reuse the existing Catalan names, but the poor Occitans don't even have that. It's a miracle the Cathar heresy even made it into the game.

They could even easily have Andorra as a temple holding in Urgell, but vassal to the Pope.

So, yeah, that whole region is not exactly the most accurate in CK2.

 

[GCRust]

It's a miracle the Cathar heresy even made it into the game.

Except it isn't, really. There's a heresy called Catharism, but it doesn't really reflect Cathar beliefs at all. Specifically, the whole reason Catharism was considered such a dangerous heresy in the first place - the belief that the world was a construct of evil, and all things mortal were sinful. Meaning procreation was fundamentally discouraged.
Becoming Cathar ought to immediately result in Celibate traits applied to the believers.

It would go a long way to actually make Heresies interesting if they had an overall threatening presence in the game world.