The High Medieval Era · 1054-1300 · Constantinople, Thrace, Macedonia, Bulgaria
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
The Bogomils began in tenth-century Bulgaria and were still there, and in Byzantine territory, throughout this period. What their opponents describe is a movement with no church buildings, no clergy in the ordinary sense, no sacraments as the church understood them, and a teaching that the material world and the institutions of the visible church alike belonged to an evil power. Around the turn of the twelfth century the emperor Alexios I had a Bogomil teacher called Basil brought to Constantinople, drew out his beliefs by pretending to be a convert, and had him burned in the Hippodrome. The emperor's daughter Anna Komnene tells the story, and Alexios commissioned the theologian Euthymios Zigabenos to write the movement up for refutation. In 1211 a synod at Tarnovo anathematized them again. Not one line survives that a Bogomil wrote about themselves.
No sources recorded.