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.

Within the Second Bulgarian Empire, Bogomilism posed a long-standing challenge to Orthodox ideas about how the world, salvation, and society worked. At its core it was dualist: the spiritual world belonged to the good God, while the visible, material world came from an evil power, usually identified with the devil. For Orthodox writers, this meant that Bogomils rejected the Old Testament, the Trinity, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, and devotion to the Virgin. Since matter was seen as corrupt or even demonic, the physical things the Orthodox Church used to give grace—water, oil, bread, wine, churches, relics, and holy images—lost their sacred value. Bogomils either rejected the sacraments or gave them a very different meaning, denied the authority of the clergy and church hierarchy, and refused to venerate icons and the cross. These beliefs did not touch a side issue; they struck at practices that were central to public Christianity in Bulgaria.

Bogomilism was part of a broader group of medieval dualist movements. Its closest Balkan forerunner was Paulicianism, whose followers had been moved by Byzantine emperors from Asia Minor into Thrace, near the Bulgarian border. After the old Byzantine-Bulgarian frontier disappeared, Paulician communities and individuals moved more freely into Bulgarian lands. Bogomilism was not the same as Paulicianism, but it grew in a setting already shaped by Paulician and, ultimately, Manichaean dualism. From the Balkans, related ideas and ways of organizing communities became linked with the Cathars of western Europe. Latin writers on heresy described such dualist groups as churches, or ecclesiae, and spoke of communities tied to Bulgaria, Melnik and Dragovitia. Western Cathar traditions therefore treated the Balkans, especially the Bulgarian and Dragovitian churches, as major sources of teaching and authority, even though not every group labeled dualist or heretical was the same institutionally.

Even so, the Bogomils had an organized religious life of their own, despite rejecting the Orthodox hierarchy. Their community was led by an elder called the dedets, and apostles or teachers had special authority. Members were divided into the ‘perfect’, who had gone through full initiation, kept a strict discipline, and taught the others, and the much larger group of ordinary believers. Their main shared rite was a prayer meeting centered on the Lord’s Prayer, along with mutual confession instead of sacramental confession to an Orthodox priest. So Bogomilism did not do away with religious authority; it moved authority away from bishops, ordained clergy, and sacramental institutions and placed it in a separate community and its teachers. That parallel structure helps explain why church and state saw even a small sect as dangerous.

In a medieval Orthodox kingdom, religious unity also meant political unity. The tsar ruled as a Christian sovereign inside a sacred order reflected in the church hierarchy. His authority was shown through coronation, liturgy, icons, monasteries, and the title of ‘Orthodox tsar’. A teaching that rejected sacred matter, the priesthood, and the visible Church therefore attacked the institutions that gave royal power its public form. Bogomilism could also attract people who felt cut off from church and society, especially in times of war, territorial loss, and economic strain. But it should not simply be understood as a social rebellion. Its immediate danger was that it created a different religious loyalty and denied the spiritual basis shared by ruler, hierarchy, and political elite.

The first direct clash between a ruler of the Second Bulgarian Empire and Bogomilism took place under Tsar Boril. His position was weak. Other members of the ruling family held important lands, military campaigns had gone badly, and Bulgaria had lost territory in Thrace and Macedonia. These problems made officials fear that religious dissent could deepen political division. The account preserved in the Bulgarian Synodikon describes Bogomilism as a harmful growth that appeared after Boril became tsar and as a pack of wolves attacking Christ’s flock. This gives the impression of an empire-wide crisis, but the movement was probably much smaller in reality. Boril also had a clear political reason to please the Orthodox hierarchy, since its support could strengthen a disputed throne.

On 11 February 1211, a Friday in Cheesefare Week, Boril called an anti-Bogomil council in a church at Trnovo. Royal officials had ordered heretics gathered from across the kingdom and brought to the capital. The assembly brought together church leaders, priests, and monks, along with the boyars and many others. Boril appears not just as the council’s secular protector but as an active defender of doctrine who joined the argument. The Bogomils were questioned and refuted, and the official account presents them as silent and shamed. Those who would not submit were punished and sent into exile. The Synodikon also links the names Michael, Theodore, Dobre, Stefan, Vasil and Peter with the condemned heresy, though these may include people remembered from an earlier period as well as leaders present in 1211.

The council’s most lasting outcome was the Bulgarian Synodikon of Tsar Boril. By the tsar’s order, the Byzantine Synodikon of Orthodoxy was translated from Greek into Bulgarian, and the acts of the Trnovo council were added to it. The Byzantine text had been created for the celebration of the restoration of icon veneration in 843, and it included statements of Orthodox belief and curses against later heresies. The Bulgarian version added the condemnation of Bogomilism and was to be read every year on the first Sunday of Lent. It was therefore more than a record of a trial. It turned one council into a recurring liturgical statement about what the Bulgarian kingdom was. Each reading linked the condemnation of heresy with the ‘Orthodox tsar’, the Orthodox council, and the unity of the apostolic Church.

The Synodikon also shows Bulgaria’s church orientation. Although Kalojan had formally accepted union with Rome in 1204, Boril’s council followed Constantinopolitan practice and used one of the key texts of Byzantine Orthodoxy. At the same time, the council did not make Boril hostile to all western Christians. In 1213 he formed close ties with the Latin emperor and the Catholic king of Hungary. His policy separated doctrine at home from practical diplomacy abroad. There is also no evidence of a long, harsh persecution after 1211. The lack of further notices during Boril’s reign, together with the failure of hostile Greek and Latin writers to make much of a supposedly huge Bulgarian heresy, suggests that the council struck at a limited sect while also serving the tsar’s need for church approval.

For most of the thirteenth century, Bogomilism stayed on the edge of recorded Bulgarian political life. Western writers still placed Bulgarian lands within the wider map of dualist churches, and some groups may have survived in places such as Melnik and Dragovitia. Even so, no later Bulgarian campaign like that of 1211 is recorded during the century. Papal claims about Bulgarian heresy could be used to justify politically driven war, especially after Bulgaria allied itself with Nicaea and moved away from its nominal Roman link; such claims do not prove a mass Bogomil revival. The restoration of the Bulgarian patriarchate in 1235 further tied the state to the Orthodox world. For the rest of the century, Bogomilism seems to have survived only as a weak remnant, not as a movement able to shape royal policy.

The anti-heretical activity of the fourteenth century was broader and more complicated than a simple return of classical Bogomilism. Bulgaria, Byzantium and Serbia were deeply involved in monastic, literary and theological exchange. Monks moved between Trnovo, Mount Athos, Constantinople, Bulgaria and Serbia, carrying books and religious practices across political borders. Older labels were reused too: ‘Messalian’, originally the name of an ancient sect, had become a common insult for Bogomils or for mystical groups thought to lean toward Bogomil ideas. Because of this, accusations of Bogomilism, Messalianism, magic, sexual looseness and disrespect for church authority could overlap. Bulgarian rulers were not facing one single organization, but a series of teachers whose ideas mixed dualist, anti-sacramental, mystical, and anti-clerical elements in different ways.

The immediate theological background was the hesychast controversy in Byzantium. Hesychasts sought inner stillness and contact with divine light through focused prayer, controlled breathing, and bodily discipline. Barlaam of Calabria mocked these practices and attacked the theology behind the claim that divine light could be experienced. Gregory Palamas defended the monks and said hesychasm fit Orthodox tradition. On 10 June 1341 a council in Constantinople condemned Barlaam and supported Palamas. The dispute continued during the Byzantine civil war, with Gregory Akindynos and other opponents of Palamas carrying on the anti-hesychast side, but the Tomos of 1351 made Palamite teaching broadly binding in the Orthodox world. In Bulgaria, ‘Barlaamite’ thus became not just a label from a Byzantine debate but a recognized name for heresy.

Tsar Ivan Alexander firmly backed the hesychast side. He supported Gregory of Sinai, who had settled at the remote monastery of Paroria inside Bulgarian territory, and he also supported monasteries where hesychast spirituality flourished. Gregory’s most important Bulgarian disciple was Theodosius of Trnovo, a monk educated in Greek who translated hesychast writings into Bulgarian. After Gregory died around 1346 and the Paroria brotherhood scattered, Ivan Alexander kept supporting Theodosius. Around 1351 Theodosius founded a monastery at Kilifarevo near Trnovo, with help from Romylos and the future patriarch Euthymius. Kilifarevo became both a spiritual center and a tool for tightening doctrine, spreading hesychast teaching while training churchmen who could recognize and oppose rival forms of mysticism.

One of the first teachers Theodosius dealt with was Theodorit, a learned visitor from Constantinople and a follower of Barlaam and Akindynos. He mixed anti-hesychast theology with magical healing and won many followers, including people from the upper classes. His supporters were accused of bowing to an oak tree and sacrificing sheep. That allowed his enemies to present Barlaamite ideas, popular magic, and non-Christian ritual as one and the same threat. This case also shows that heretical teachers were not limited to poor or marginal people. Theodorit’s success among the well-born made his teaching politically sensitive and helps explain why monastic theologians such as Theodosius wanted direct action from the tsar.

A more clearly Bogomil or Messalian current came through the followers of Irene, a nun from Thessaloniki. Her teaching was mystical and strongly focused on the individual rather than a simple repeat of classical Bogomil doctrine, but people at the time called it Messalian, a term then often linked with Bogomilism. After spreading on Mount Athos for three years, the movement was condemned by a Byzantine council in 1344, and its followers were exiled. Two of them, Lazar and Kiril Bosota, reached Trnovo. Lazar walked through the city naked except for a pumpkin leaf; people saw him either as mad or as an Adamite, someone trying to restore the human state before the Fall. Bosota was the more serious preacher. He attacked icons, the cross, clergy, and marriage, encouraged divorce, and, according to his opponents, taught that bodily desire should be indulged because the body was the devil’s creation. Among his followers was a priest named Stefan.

In 1350 Theodosius persuaded Ivan Alexander to call a great council at Trnovo. The patriarch and clergy attended, along with the boyar council, so the gathering repeated the joining of royal, church, and noble authority seen in 1211. Theodosius led the theological argument and gave a major defense of Orthodoxy. Lazar repented and was brought back, but Bosota and the priest Stefan stayed defiant. They were branded on the face and expelled from the kingdom. The punishment combined public shame with removal from the community, and it was meant both to weaken the teachers and to show the council’s victory. Ivan Alexander supplied the force and ceremony, while Theodosius supplied the learning; neither could have carried out the campaign as effectively alone.

The first council did not end the flow of heterodox teachers. Theodosius next argued against an Adamite who wanted clothing removed in imitation of Adam and was accused of promoting group sexual misconduct. Judaizing teachers also began to attack icons, church buildings, the clergy, and monasticism. Their teachings overlapped with older Bogomil hostility to material worship and church institutions, though they were not just Bogomils under another name. The presence of a Jewish community and the fact that Ivan Alexander’s second wife had been born Jewish before converting to Christianity gave the dispute a delicate social setting. But the proceedings targeted active preachers who challenged Christian practice, not Bulgarian Jewry as a whole; in the decades that followed, Bulgaria still received Jewish refugees.

In 1360 Ivan Alexander called a second anti-heretical council, attended by the royal family, the patriarch, bishops, and many monks. Its main business was three Judaizing teachers. One accepted the council’s ruling and entered, or returned to, Orthodoxy, while the other two refused and were tortured. The council also renewed the condemnation of Bogomilism and Barlaamism, putting inherited dualism, opposition to hesychasm, and present-day Judaizing criticism into one official list of errors. Once again, Theodosius stood at the center of a campaign that brought theological charges before royal and conciliar authority. The renewed curse against Bogomilism shows that a few suspected Bogomils, or people with Bogomil-like views, still remained, probably around Trnovo. After 1360, however, Bogomilism disappears from Bulgarian records, and what was left of it was clearly small and weak.

The last major anti-heretical campaign of the century was led by Euthymius, Theodosius’s most important disciple and patriarch of Trnovo from 1375 to 1393. Euthymius combined hesychast spirituality, literary reform, and church discipline. He acted against Piron, who had come from Constantinople, and Piron’s disciple, the monk Theodosius Fudul. Although they were called Barlaamites, they also attacked icons and respect for senior clergy and were linked with magic and ideas thought to be demonic. Their influence reached people from the upper classes and the clergy, but Euthymius had them driven out of Bulgaria. He added more curses against heretics to the Synodikon, urged correspondents such as Kiprian and Nikodim of Tismana to stay alert in matters of doctrine, and held up Hilarion of Moglena, an earlier opponent of Paulicians and Bogomils, as a model bishop who stood firm.

Euthymius’s correction of Bulgarian church books was part of the same effort. He demanded careful comparison with Greek originals, limited copying to properly trained scribes, and required new manuscripts to be approved by the patriarch before they could be used in worship. Tsar Ivan Shishman supported these rules, tying uniform texts to royal power just as Boril had tied the translation of the Synodikon to his council in 1211. Euthymius also treated moral discipline—marriage, divorce, and clerical conduct—as inseparable from correct belief. Even after the fall of Trnovo in 1393 and his later exile, he kept defending Orthodox teaching. Across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the struggle against heresy thus changed from the suppression of one dualist sect into a wider program of religious order. Hesychasm gave it spiritual and intellectual force, councils gave it public judgment, the Synodikon preserved that judgment in worship, and the tsar’s authority gave church condemnations practical weight.

Bogomilism was a Christian movement in medieval Bulgaria. Its followers said the good God ruled the spirit world, but an evil power ruled the physical world. Because of that, they rejected church rituals, priests, icons, the cross, and much of the official church teaching.

This made them a serious threat to the Orthodox Church and to the ruler, since faith and rule were closely tied together. On 11 February 1211, Tsar Boril held a council in Trnovo to condemn them. Those who refused to change were punished or sent away. A book of church rules and condemnations was then read each year to remind people of this victory.

Bogomilism did not disappear at once, but it slowly became weaker. In the 1300s, Bulgarian rulers and church leaders fought other teachers too, not just old Bogomils. Under Tsar Ivan Alexander, monks like Theodosius of Trnovo led councils against people seen as heretics.

By the end of the 1300s, the fight against heresy had become part of a larger effort to keep the Bulgarian church united and strong. Bogomilism itself was mostly gone, but the state and church kept using these campaigns to defend Orthodox rule and belief.