Bogomilism and the Heresies

Within the Second Bulgarian Empire, Bogomilism represented an inherited challenge to the Orthodox understanding of creation, salvation and society. Its central principle was dualist: the spiritual realm belonged to the good God, while the visible and material world was attributed to an evil power, commonly identified with the devil. Orthodox condemnations accordingly accused Bogomils of opposing the Old Testament, the Trinity, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, and the veneration of the Virgin. Because matter was considered corrupt or demonic, the material means through which the Orthodox Church communicated grace—water, oil, bread, wine, church buildings, relics and sacred images—lost their religious legitimacy. Bogomils rejected or radically reinterpreted the sacraments, denied the authority of the established priesthood and hierarchy, and refused the cult of icons and the cross. These teachings struck at practices that were not peripheral but central to public Christianity in Bulgaria.

Bogomilism belonged to a wider family of medieval dualist movements. Its most immediate Balkan predecessor was Paulicianism, whose adherents had been transferred by Byzantine emperors from Asia Minor into Thrace, close to the Bulgarian frontier. Paulician communities and individuals later moved more freely into Bulgarian lands after the disappearance of the old Byzantine-Bulgarian border. Bogomilism was not simply identical with Paulicianism, but it developed in an environment already shaped by Paulician and ultimately Manichaean dualism. From the Balkans, related teachings and organizational traditions became connected with the Cathars of western Europe. Latin heresiologists described dualist communities as churches or ecclesiae and identified communities associated with Bulgaria, Melnik and Dragovitia. Western Cathar traditions consequently regarded the Balkans, and especially the Bulgarian and Dragovitian churches, as important sources of doctrine and authority, although not every movement branded as dualist or heretical was institutionally identical.

The Bogomils themselves possessed a structured religious life despite their rejection of the Orthodox hierarchy. Their community was headed by an elder, known as the dedets, while apostles or teachers enjoyed particular authority. Members were divided between the ‘perfect’, who had been fully initiated, followed a demanding discipline and instructed the rest, and the much larger body of ordinary believers. Their principal collective rite was a prayer meeting centered on the Lord’s Prayer, accompanied by mutual confession rather than sacramental confession to an Orthodox priest. Thus Bogomilism did not abolish religious authority; it transferred authority from bishops, ordained clergy and sacramental institutions to an alternative community and its teachers. This parallel organization helps explain why the Church and state considered even a numerically modest sect dangerous.

In a medieval Orthodox kingdom, religious unity was also a principle of political unity. The tsar ruled as a Christian sovereign within a sacred order mirrored by the hierarchy of the Church, and his legitimacy was expressed through coronation, liturgy, icons, monasteries and the title of ‘Orthodox tsar’. A doctrine that denied sacred matter, the priesthood and the visible Church therefore challenged the institutions through which royal authority was represented. Bogomilism could also appeal to those alienated from the ecclesiastical and social establishment, especially in periods of war, territorial loss and economic hardship. Yet it should not be reduced to a program of social revolt. Its immediate danger lay in its creation of an alternative religious allegiance that denied the spiritual foundations shared by ruler, hierarchy and political elite.

The first direct confrontation between a ruler of the Second Bulgarian Empire and Bogomilism occurred under Tsar Boril. His position was insecure: rival members of the ruling family controlled important territories, military campaigns had failed, and Bulgaria had lost lands in Thrace and Macedonia. These circumstances encouraged official fears that religious dissent might intensify political fragmentation. The account preserved in the Bulgarian Synodikon describes Bogomilism as a malignant growth that appeared after Boril’s accession and as a pack of wolves ravaging the flock of Christ. This language presents an empire-wide emergency, but the scale of the movement was probably more limited. Boril also had a strong political reason to satisfy the Orthodox hierarchy, whose support could reinforce a disputed throne.

On 11 February 1211, a Friday in Cheesefare Week, Boril convened an anti-Bogomil council in a church at Trnovo. The royal authorities had ordered heretics to be gathered from across the kingdom and brought to the capital. The assembly included hierarchs, priests and monks, together with the boyars and a large body of other participants. Boril was represented not merely as the council’s secular protector but as an active defender of doctrine who took part in the disputation. The Bogomils were questioned and refuted; the triumphant official account depicts them as reduced to silence and shame. Those who refused submission were subjected to various punishments and exile. The Synodikon also preserves the names Michael, Theodore, Dobre, Stefan, Vasil and Peter in connection with the condemned heresy, although these names may include figures remembered from an earlier phase rather than only leaders present in 1211.

The council’s most enduring result was the Bulgarian Synodikon of Tsar Boril. At the tsar’s command, the Byzantine Synodikon of Orthodoxy was translated from Greek into Bulgarian, and the acts of the Trnovo council were added to it. The Byzantine work had originated in the celebration of the restoration of icon veneration in 843 and contained proclamations of Orthodox doctrine and anathemas against successive heresies. The Bulgarian version incorporated the condemnation of Bogomilism and was to be read annually on the first Sunday of Lent. It was therefore more than a record of judicial proceedings: it transformed a particular council into a recurrent liturgical statement about the nature of the Bulgarian kingdom. Every reading associated the condemnation of heresy with the ‘Orthodox tsar’, the Orthodox council and the unity of the apostolic Church.

The Synodikon also illuminates Bulgaria’s ecclesiastical orientation. Although Kalojan had formally accepted union with Rome in 1204, Boril’s council followed Constantinopolitan procedure and employed one of the defining texts of Byzantine Orthodoxy. The council did not turn Boril into an inflexible enemy of all western Christians; in 1213 he established close relations with the Latin emperor and the Catholic king of Hungary. His policy distinguished theological conformity within Bulgaria from pragmatic diplomacy abroad. Nor is there evidence of a sustained mass persecution after 1211. The absence of further notices during Boril’s reign, together with the failure of hostile Greek and Latin writers to exploit a supposedly vast Bulgarian heresy, suggests that the council struck at a limited sect while simultaneously serving the tsar’s need for ecclesiastical approval.

For most of the thirteenth century Bogomilism remained at the margins of recorded Bulgarian political life. Western descriptions continued to place Bulgarian lands within the international geography of dualist churches, and individual groups may have survived in regions such as Melnik and Dragovitia. Nevertheless, no later Bulgarian campaign comparable to that of 1211 is recorded during the century. Papal accusations of Bulgarian heresy could be employed as a justification for politically motivated war, especially after Bulgaria aligned itself with Nicaea and moved away from its nominal Roman connection; such accusations do not demonstrate a mass Bogomil revival. The restoration of the Bulgarian patriarchate in 1235 further anchored the state within the Orthodox commonwealth. For the remainder of the century, Bogomilism appears to have persisted as a residual current rather than as a movement capable of dictating royal policy.

The fourteenth-century revival of anti-heretical activity was broader and more complex than a simple resurgence of classical Bogomilism. Bulgaria, Byzantium and Serbia were experiencing intense monastic, literary and theological exchange. Monks moved among Trnovo, Mount Athos, Constantinople, Bulgaria and Serbia, carrying texts and spiritual practices across political frontiers. Older polemical names were also reused: ‘Messalian’, originally the designation of an ancient sect, had become a common term of abuse for Bogomils or for mystical groups suspected of Bogomil tendencies. Consequently, accusations of Bogomilism, Messalianism, magical practice, sexual license and contempt for the hierarchy could overlap. The Bulgarian authorities confronted not one coherent organization but a succession of teachers whose doctrines combined dualist, anti-sacramental, mystical and anti-clerical elements in different proportions.

The immediate theological setting was the hesychast controversy in Byzantium. Hesychasts sought spiritual stillness and an awareness of divine light through concentrated prayer, regulated breathing and bodily discipline. Barlaam of Calabria ridiculed these practices and attacked the theology underlying the claim that the divine light could be experienced. Gregory Palamas defended the monks and presented hesychasm as fully consistent with Orthodox tradition. On 10 June 1341 a council in Constantinople condemned Barlaam and upheld Palamas. The controversy continued through the Byzantine civil war, with Gregory Akindynos and other opponents of Palamas maintaining the anti-hesychast cause, but the Tomos of 1351 made Palamite teaching generally binding within the Orthodox world. In Bulgaria, ‘Barlaamite’ consequently became not merely a description of one side in a Byzantine debate but a recognized category of heresy.

Tsar Ivan Alexander placed Bulgaria firmly on the hesychast side. He patronized Gregory of Sinai, who had established himself at the remote monastery of Paroria within Bulgarian territory, and supported the monasteries in which hesychast spirituality flourished. Gregory’s most important Bulgarian disciple was Theodosius of Trnovo, a Greek-educated monk who translated hesychast writings into Bulgarian. After Gregory’s death around 1346 and the dispersal of the Paroria brotherhood, Ivan Alexander continued his support for Theodosius. Around 1351 Theodosius established a monastery at Kilifarevo near Trnovo, assisted by Romylos and by the future patriarch Euthymius. Kilifarevo became both a spiritual center and an instrument of doctrinal consolidation, spreading hesychast teaching while training churchmen capable of identifying and opposing rival forms of mysticism.

Among the first teachers confronted by Theodosius was Theodorit, a learned visitor from Constantinople and a disciple of Barlaam and Akindynos. He combined anti-hesychast theology with magical healing and attracted many followers, including members of the upper classes. His adherents were accused of bowing before an oak tree and sacrificing sheep. Such practices allowed his opponents to portray Barlaamite intellectual dissent, popular magic and non-Christian ritual as parts of the same threat. The case also demonstrates that heretical teachers were not confined to impoverished or marginal circles. Theodorit’s success among the well-born made his teaching politically sensitive and showed why monastic theologians such as Theodosius sought direct intervention from the tsar.

A more recognizably Bogomil or Messalian current came through the followers of Irene, a nun from Thessaloniki. Her teaching was mystical and individualistic rather than a straightforward repetition of classical Bogomil doctrine, but contemporaries called it Messalian, a term then commonly associated with Bogomilism. After spreading on Mount Athos for three years, the movement was condemned by a Byzantine council in 1344, and its adherents were exiled. Two of them, Lazar and Kiril Bosota, reached Trnovo. Lazar went naked through the city, covering himself only with a pumpkin leaf; he was regarded either as insane or as an Adamite attempting to recover humanity’s condition before the Fall. Bosota was the more formidable preacher. He attacked icons, the cross, clergy and marriage, encouraged divorce and, according to his opponents, taught indulgence of bodily desire on the grounds that the body was the devil’s creation. Among his disciples was a priest named Stefan.

In 1350 Theodosius persuaded Ivan Alexander to summon a great council at Trnovo. It was attended by the patriarch and clergy as well as the boyar council, thus reproducing the union of royal, ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority seen in 1211. Theodosius played the leading theological role and delivered a major defense of Orthodoxy. Lazar repented and was reconciled, but Bosota and the priest Stefan remained defiant. They were branded on the face and expelled from the kingdom. The punishments combined public humiliation with removal from the community and were meant both to disable the teachers and to advertise the victory of the council. Ivan Alexander supplied the coercive and ceremonial authority, while Theodosius supplied the theological expertise; neither the monk nor the tsar could have conducted the campaign as effectively without the other.

The first council did not end the succession of heterodox teachers. Theodosius next refuted an Adamite who advocated the removal of clothing in imitation of Adam and was accused of encouraging collective sexual misconduct. Judaizing teachers also began attacking icons, church buildings, the clergy and monasticism. Their teachings overlapped with older Bogomil hostility toward material worship and ecclesiastical institutions, though they were not simply Bogomils under another name. The presence of a Jewish community and the Jewish origin of Ivan Alexander’s second wife, who had converted to Christianity, gave the controversy a sensitive social setting. Yet the proceedings were directed against active preachers who challenged Christian practices, not against Bulgarian Jewry as a whole; Bulgaria continued to receive Jewish refugees in the following decades.

In 1360 Ivan Alexander convened a second anti-heretical council, attended by the royal family, the patriarch, bishops and numerous monks. Its principal proceedings concerned three Judaizing teachers. One accepted the council’s judgment and entered or returned to Orthodoxy, while the other two refused and were tortured. The council also renewed the condemnation of Bogomilism and Barlaamism, placing inherited dualism, opposition to hesychasm and contemporary Judaizing criticism within a single official catalogue of errors. Theodosius again stood at the center of the campaign that brought theological accusations before royal and conciliar authority. The renewed anathema against Bogomilism indicates that a few suspected Bogomils or people holding Bogomil-like views remained, probably around Trnovo. After 1360, however, Bogomilism disappears from Bulgarian records, and its remnants were evidently small and weak.

The final major anti-heretical campaign of the century was led by Euthymius, Theodosius’s most prominent disciple and patriarch of Trnovo from 1375 to 1393. Euthymius combined hesychast spirituality, literary reform and ecclesiastical discipline. He acted against Piron, who had come from Constantinople, and Piron’s disciple, the monk Theodosius Fudul. Although described as Barlaamites, they also attacked icons and respect for the higher clergy and were associated with magic and allegedly demonic ideas. Their influence reached members of the upper classes and clergy, but Euthymius secured their expulsion from Bulgaria. He inserted further anathemas against heretics into the Synodikon, urged correspondents such as Kiprian and Nikodim of Tismana to maintain doctrinal vigilance, and elevated Hilarion of Moglena, an earlier opponent of Paulicians and Bogomils, as a model of episcopal resistance.

Euthymius’s correction of Bulgarian liturgical and theological books formed part of the same struggle. He demanded accurate comparison with Greek originals, restricted copying to properly trained scribes and required new manuscripts to receive patriarchal approval before liturgical use. Tsar Ivan Shishman endorsed these regulations, linking textual uniformity to royal authority just as Boril had linked the translation of the Synodikon to his council in 1211. Euthymius also treated moral discipline—marriage, divorce and clerical conduct—as inseparable from doctrinal orthodoxy. Even after the fall of Trnovo in 1393 and his subsequent exile, he continued the defense of Orthodox teaching. Across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the campaign against heresy therefore evolved from the suppression of a specific dualist sect into a comprehensive program of religious order. Hesychasm provided its spiritual and intellectual energy, councils supplied public judgment, the Synodikon preserved that judgment in worship, and the tsar’s authority gave ecclesiastical condemnation practical force.