Such are some of the main features of the Bogomilian heresy, as they have come down to us, to a great extent, from the writings of their bitterest opponents. Nor will anyone marvel that these doctrines should have spread as they did among those Sclavonic races, who acted as the missionaries of the first Reformation in Western Europe. It can hardly be considered fanciful if we detect certain remarkable analogies between the belief and observances of the Bogomiles and the primitive institutions, and even the heathen religion, of the Sclaves. It has already been mentioned that the Manichæan conversion began among the Bulgarians when they were still to a great extent pagan. The same is true with regard to the spread of the Bogomilian heresy among the Serbs, with whom heathendom held its own in parts till the thirteenth century.[37] A remarkable uniformity presents itself in the languages, beliefs, and institutions of all Sclavonic nations; and if we may assert, from the analogy of the Baltic Sclaves, that the Bulgarians and Serbs also divided their worship between their Black God or Spirit of Evil, and their White God or Spirit of Good, it follows that the Manichæan missionaries found the dualistic theology, which lies at the bottom of so much of their doctrine, already existing among the people they wished to convert;[38] while the propagandists of orthodoxy must have discovered to their vexation that the Sclavonic mind had been trained by superstition, as well as by what mother-wit it possessed, to rebel against their stupendous dogma, that an All-powerful Spirit of Good could create and tolerate the Spirit of Evil. Our Presbyter Cosmas notices that this difficulty presented itself, even to the ‘orthodox’ Bulgarians, and so lost is he in indignation at these profane inquiries as to the devil’s paternity, that he forgets to answer them.
An equally marked parallel is presented between the customs and church government, if the expression is allowable, of the Bogomiles, and the primitive institutions of the Sclaves. Their Presbyters answer to the Sclavonic Starescina, the elders of the primitive family-community. The Communistic doctrines which these heretics discovered in the New Testament fitted in well with the equality and fraternity of the Sclavonic home-life. They were essentially levellers, and their evangelic religion was mixed up, as among the Puritans of Western Europe, with political insurgency. In Bulgaria we seem to trace, in the opposition of the Bogomiles to the powers that be, an alliance between them and the champions of the Sclavonic democracy against the usurpations of the Ugrian dynasty and nobles. ‘They rail,’ says Cosmas, ‘at the magistrates and boljars (or nobles), and hold it a crime to do service for the Czar. They say, moreover, to every servant that he should not serve his master.’ The Bogomiles, it must be remembered, become a political power in Bosnia just at the time when the ‘elders’ and Župans, who represented the free institutions which the Sclavonic settlers brought with them, are bowing before the Bans and a new, semi-feudal, nobility.
By the beginning of the twelfth century the Bogomilian heresy had struck such firm root in Bosnia as to rouse the faithful sons of the Church in Hungary and Dalmatia to armed opposition, insomuch that in 1138 Bela II. was induced to make an incursion against the ‘Patarenes,’ in the country between the Cetina and Narenta.[39] It was not, however, till the end of this century that the progress of heresy in other parts turned the Pope’s serious attention to the fountain-head of the ‘Bulgarian heresy,’ then undoubtedly his Illyrian province. Nominally, Bosnia had long belonged to the Church of Rome, which claimed Western Illyricum as an inheritance from the Western Empire. Practically, what orthodox Christianity Bosnia and the other Serbian lands possessed was of a strongly national character, and derived, not from Roman sources, but from the missionary efforts of the Sclavonic apostles, Cyril and Methodius.[40] But the Church of Bosnia, though using the native liturgy and eschewing the Latin language, acknowledged some allegiance to Rome, and the bishops of Bosnia recognized the Archbishop of Salona[41] as their metropolitan. In the year 1180 Culin himself is still considered a dutiful son of the Church. But a few years later Culin ‘has degenerated from himself’ and fallen into heresy, and together with his wife[42] and his sister, the widow of the Count of Chelm, had given ear to the Patarenes, as Roman ecclesiastics begin to call the Bogomiles who have now spread their heresy into Italy and the West. The Pope, exerting pressure on Culin by means of the King of Hungary, had the satisfaction of seeing him recant in person at Rome.[43] But a few years later, in 1199, the Prince of orthodox Zenta, which we may almost translate Montenegro, informs the Pope by letter that Culin has relapsed into his errors, and that ten thousand of his subjects are already infected with the heresy.[44] A little later, we hear that Daniel, the bishop of Bosnia himself, has joined the Patarenes, who shortly after destroyed the orthodox-Roman Cathedral and Episcopal palace at Crescevo. From this time begins an ominous interregnum in the Roman Episcopate of Bosnia.
It was in vain that the Pope appealed to the King of Hungary to punish his heretic vassal. Culin was now too strong to fear even the Hungarian arms; and at the very period when the hordes of De Montfort were devastating Provence, the Banat of Bosnia offered an asylum to persecuted adherents of the Bulgarian heresy throughout Europe. This is hardly the place to show how essentially the first Protestants of Western Europe, the Bulgares as they are called by orthodox writers of the age, were spiritual children of the Sclavonic Bogomiles. The history of the Patarenes and Albigenses of Italy and Provence, of the ‘Ketzers’[45] of the Lower Rhine, who made their way even to our shores, lies of course beyond the scope of this essay. Word for word, nearly all that has been, with some pains, collected here, from Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Bosnian sources, regarding the tenets of the more Eastern heretics, might be paralleled by citations from Latin chronicles,[46] touching those who broke the harmony of Western Christendom. Enough if, while describing the belief and observances of the Bogomiles in Bosnia and Bulgaria, we have alluded, here and there, to such striking similarities in the details of church ministration and observances as show that the more Western sectaries clung to their original Bulgarian model in its minutest particulars. The doctrinal differences themselves which afflicted the more Western offshoots of the heresy had, as we have seen, their roots in a Bulgarian, perhaps an Armenian, soil.[47] Bulgarian elders sat in Provençal synods, Provençal bishops consulted with Bosnian Djeds on matters of faith. To the orthodox Sclave or Byzantine, there were only Bogomiles in the Languedoc, and the Romish hierarchy named the heretics of Bosnia from a suburb of Milan.[48] ‘The believers of the plains of Lombardy and the South of France,’ to quote the words of the recent Bohemian historian of Bulgaria, ‘kept up a regular intercourse with their co-religionists in the Byzantine Empire, Bosnia and Bulgaria, and long before the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders or the Turks, a mighty but secret interchange of thought was at work between East and West.’[49]
It was during the reign of Culin that this great Puritan movement attained its widest dimensions, and it is from a contemporary of his, the Italian Reniero Sacconi, who from a heretic became an inquisitor, that we obtain the most satisfactory evidence as to the organization of this early Protestant Church, and the solidarity of its various members, Sclavonic, Greek, Romance, and Teutonic. The Church of the Cathari, as he calls them, numbered then as many as thirteen bishoprics, amongst which that of Bosnia or ‘Slavonia’ was not the least important. By Culin’s time, the Bogomilian missionaries had succeeded in disseminating their Armenian doctrines from Philippopolis to Bordeaux, and had formed, if we may so term it, a middle kingdom of their own—a Lotharingia of heterodoxy, extending in an unbroken zone through the centre of orthodox Europe, from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. Nay, the ark of the faithful, borne northwards and westwards on the free bosom of the Rhine, had crossed the Channel, and penetrated, as it were by our great English river, to the seat of English learning; and at the very time when Protestant Christendom looked to the Ban of Bosnia as its chief protector, his Angevin contemporary, our Henry II., was branding Paulicians at Oxford.[50]
Rapid and astonishing as was the spread of these Oriental doctrines through Latin Christendom, there seems no difficulty in accounting for it when we remember the missionary zeal which the Sclavonic Bogomiles had inherited from their Armenian teachers, and which led them, as we have seen, to set apart funds for the support of Gospellers among unbelievers. The same impulses which planted an Armenian faith among the Sclaves are sufficient to account for the success with which the new converts acclimatized what was now a Sclavonic faith amongst Greeks and Latins. It is certain that the Bulgarian propaganda made use of existing trade-routes by land and sea. This indeed is not the place to enquire what part Bulgaria and what part Bosnia, what part the Save, the Danube and the Rhine, the Po or the Adige, the commercial currents of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean—what part Durazzo and the Egnatian Way, what part Byzantium and Byzantine Lower Italy, may have severally and collectively played in conveying the Bogomilian heresy to Toulouse,[51] Milan and Cologne. On the whole the Bosnian influence may be regarded as later and secondary. It is probable that the first wave of propagandism was almost entirely Bulgarian, and followed in the wake of Greek merchantmen. The great part played by Bosnia was rather that of asylum for the persecuted, and promoter of the faith, in days when heresy had been stamped out elsewhere with fire and sword. We have, however, precise data as to the Bogomilian religion having been communicated to Dalmatia through commercial relations with the interior of Bosnia,[52] and doubtless, just as the Bulgarians, the South-Easternmost of the Sclavonic races of the Balkan peninsula, first received their Manichæan Puritanism from Armenia and the East, so the Bosnians, the North-Westernmost[53] of the Balkan Sclaves, played at least a part in first communicating it to Europe and the West.
It is from the pen of a St. Alban’s monk, and a letter of a bishop of Porto, that we gain the most convincing testimony as to the influence which, in the palmy days of Ban Culin, and the period immediately succeeding, was exercised by Bosnia in directing the great Protestant movement in Western Europe. Matthew Paris[54] relates that the Albigensians of Provence and Italy possessed a pope of their own, who resided in Bosnia.[55] This man created a vicar ‘in partibus Galliarum.’ The vicar of this Bosnian anti-pope, who resided at Toulouse, granted him some lands at a place called Porlos, and the Albigensian heretics betook themselves to their Bosnian pope to consult him on divers questions of faith. Matthew Paris and Ralph of Coggeshale are certainly wrong in converting this Bosnian elder into an anti-pope, and his vicar into the parody of an orthodox bishop,[56] hierarchy of any sort being, as we have seen, alien to the spirit of the Bogomilian as well as to the Albigensian sectaries. Yet it is quite possible that a kind of informal primacy was at this time accorded to the Bosnian Djed, and he may have fulfilled such moderating functions, as interpreter in matters doctrinal, as seem to have devolved, a century before, on the ‘heresiarch’ Basil. The fact that this vicar had been originally sent to the Albigenses by the Illyrian ‘antipope’ is a convincing proof of the direct missionary connection between Bosnia and Provence, and the whole incident shows that in the thirteenth century the Western heretics still looked to the Slavonic East for the sources of true belief.
It was in vain that on Culin’s death the King of Hungary appointed a Catholic Ban Zibisclave. It was in vain that in 1216 the Pope sent the sub-deacon Aconcius to labour at the conversion of the heretics. The Bogomiles only gained strength, and their faith struck firmer roots in the neighbouring countries of Croatia, Dalmatia, Istria, Carniola, and Slavonia. But Rome, in the Albigensian crusades, had already tasted Christian blood, and resolved to have recourse to the same weapons in Bosnia which she had employed so efficaciously in Provence. An Archbishop of Colocz was at hand to play the part of the Abbot of Citeaux. In 1222 he entered Bosnia at the head of an Hungarian host, and used the sword with such good effect that he had shortly possessed himself of the provinces of ‘Bosna, Ussora, and Soy.’ Zibisclav, who had defected from the true faith, saw himself reduced to abjure his errors and to fling himself at the toes of St. Peter, and the Pope was graciously pleased ‘to embrace sincerely in the arms of his charity both his person and his lands, and all the goods that he at the present possessed.’[57] But Zibisclav’s subjects were not inclined to follow the example of their Ban. On the contrary, they hardened their hearts, and in the very year, 1233, in which this fond embrace took place, a Bogomilian ‘pope’ or bishop continued to flourish and exercise a powerful authority in Bosnia. A new crusade was necessary. Coloman, the brother of the King of Hungary,[58] was the De Montfort of the occasion, and in 1238 entered Bosnia with a large army to exterminate the heretics. He extended his havoc through the whole country, and even ‘purged,’ we are told, the principality of Chelm, which answers to the south-western part of the Herzegovina. From this period onwards the history of Bosnia for centuries consists of little more than a series of such bloody inroads; but there are here none of those details which secure for the heretics of Alby the commiseration of mankind. Cities are sacked, but there is not here a Beziers or Carcassonne; the first germs of a civilization are trodden under foot, but these are not the full-blown roses of Provence; troubadours of a kind there doubtless were here, too, but it was in barbarous Sclavonic tongue, and not in the polished Langue d’Oc that they poured forth ‘their unpremeditated lay,’ and the sound of their lyre died away among the mountains that gave them birth.[59]
Gregory IX. congratulates Coloman on ‘wiping out the heresy and restoring the light of Catholic purity,’[60] but the Pope was quick in discovering that these congratulations were premature. The Tartar invasion which in 1241 weakened Hungary was the strength of the Bogomiles of Bosnia. Nor, perhaps, did the slaughter of Ban Zibisclav and many of his bravest adherents by the horde of Khan Ugadai much affect the subjects whose creed and interests he had deserted. In 1246 Pope Innocent IV.[61] had to stir up a third Bosnian crusade, the conduct of which was entrusted to the Archbishop of Colocz—‘a man skilled,’ as was fitting in an archbishop, ‘in all the science of war.’ He received a cross from the Pope to fix upon his heart, and aided by the King Bela, of Hungary, renewed the pious work. Many heretics were butchered, others were cast into dungeons; and so great were considered the deserts of the archbishop, that the Pope transferred the church of Bosnia from Spalato to Colocz. But once more it was discovered that fire and sword had raged in vain. Heresy continued to be so rampant in Bosnia that from 1256 the episcopate of Bosnia, which had been renewed after the first crusade, lapses a second time.[62] The papacy next resorted to persuasion, the more so as during the last part of the thirteenth century the Hungarian suzerainty was becoming less and less binding on Bosnia. About the year 1260 the Minorite brothers of the order of St. Francis of Assisi were sent into Bosnia to aid the Dominicans, who had been already established here.[63] At the end of the thirteenth century Bosnia passed for a while under the overlordship of the Prince of Serbia, and Stephen Dragutine, who was favourable to the Roman church, allowed two Franciscan brothers to establish the Inquisition here in 1291.[64]