The Early Medieval Era · c. 650-878 · Armenia, Byzantium
Paulicians
Disputed history
What's actually known about this group is genuinely disputed among historians.
About This Movement
The Paulicians appear in the record between the seventh and ninth centuries in Armenia and eastern Anatolia, and almost everything said about them was written by people trying to destroy them. Byzantine heresy-hunters describe a movement that rejected the Old Testament, the cross, the sacraments and the veneration of Mary, and held a dualist view of the world. Whether that is what the Paulicians believed, or what their enemies needed them to believe, cannot now be settled. What is not in doubt is what was done to them. Imperial campaigns killed and displaced them in large numbers, and the survivors built a fortified state of their own at Tephrike on the frontier, made common cause with the Arabs, and raided Byzantine territory until the fortress fell in 878. Later emperors deported whole Paulician populations to the Balkans.
Sources
- Peter of Sicily, History of the Paulicians — trans. in Hamilton & Hamilton, Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650-c. 1450 (Manchester, 1998) (primary) — HOSTILE SOURCE — the principal Greek account, by a Byzantine envoy; all doctrinal attributions (dualism, adoptionism) come through this and related polemic. The Hamilton & Hamilton volume devotes 15 of its 50 source-headings to the Paulicians.
- Greek abjuration formulas and the Peter the Higumen / 'Pseudo-Photius' dossier — in Hamilton & Hamilton (1998) (primary) — The rest of the hostile Greek dossier, translated in the same volume.
- The Key of Truth (ed./trans. F. C. Conybeare, 1898) (primary) — CONTESTED ITEM — an Armenian text Conybeare claimed as a Paulician manual (adoptionist, non-dualist). Date and attribution are disputed (possibly much later); use only with that dispute stated.
- Nina G. Garsoian, The Paulician Heresy (1967) (secondary) — The classic critical study; argued the Greek and Armenian source-traditions diverge (Armenian evidence lacks the dualism).
- Carl Dixon, The Paulicians: Heresy, Persecution and Warfare on the Byzantine Frontier, c. 750-880 (Brill, 2022) (secondary) — Current monograph. Explicitly recasts the Paulicians as 'broadly conventional Christians' and reappraises the hostile sources.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 3: 'Beyond empire I' (Dorfmann-Lazarev); cf. ch. 2 (Louth) (reference)