About the middle of the fifth century, when Britain was passing definitely into the hands of the English, and when on the Continent the hordes of Attila were dealing the most tremendous blow that had yet fallen on the Roman Empire, Sclavonic tribes overran Mœsia, Thrace, Macedonia, and Illyricum, and pushed on to the Adriatic shores. From this period the final settlement of the Sclaves in the area of what is now known as Turkey-in-Europe may be safely dated.[1] Their first ravages over, the Sclaves, who from their communal family-organisation were little capable of formidable combination, appear to have easily accepted Roman suzerainty. The new settlers were soon among the most trusted troops of the Eastern Emperor, and at the beginning of the sixth century the Sclavonic colony of Dardania gives Eastern Rome one of its most renowned Emperors and its greatest general. The Sclave Upravda, the son of Istok, is better known as the Emperor Justinian, and Veličaŕ as Belisarius.

Thus were first cemented those peculiar relations between the Sclaves and Byzantium which are still of supreme importance in considering ‘the Eastern Question.’ The Byzantine government saw itself so capable of dealing with the Sclaves, that when the Avar nomads, at the beginning of the seventh century, devastated Illyricum, massacring alike Sclavonic settler and Roman provincial, and sacking even the coast cities of Dalmatia, Heraclius, as a masterstroke of policy, called in two new Sclavonic tribes from beyond the Danube as a counterpoise to the Avars; and the corner of the Balkan peninsula between the Save, the Morava, and the Adriatic, was divided among the Sclavonic tribes, the Serbs, and the Croats, who still throughout this area form the bulk of the population.

The account given of this settlement by Constantine Porphyrogenitus[2] is so mixed up with mythical elements that we can only accept the general outlines. As might be expected from the analogy of our own history of the conquest of Britain, the Sclavonic sagas, which seem to form the basis of the Byzantine version, bring into the field certain leaders with eponymic names;[3] but the old family life of the Sclaves asserts itself even in these legends, and we read that the Croats were led to the conquest of the Avars by a family of brothers and sisters.

The Croatian settlement seems to have been the earlier. The Croats came from the countries beyond the Carpathians, and colonized the countries now known as Austrian and Turkish Croatia, and the northern part of Dalmatia. The Save formed a rough boundary to the Croatian nationality on the north, the Verbas on the east, and to the south the Cetina.

The Serbs, then inhabiting a part of what is now Galicia, hastened to imitate the example of the Croats, and took for their share the lands to the east and south of that occupied by their brother race. They occupied the whole, or nearly the whole, of the area now occupied by Free Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Old Serbia, and the northern half of Albania, and stretched themselves along the Adriatic coasts from the neighbourhood of Spalato, where the river Cetina runs into the sea, to Durazzo, then still Dyrrhachium. Thus, with the exception of the barren corner called the Kraina, or Turkish Croatia, the whole of what is now known as Bosnia, with which we have particularly to deal, belongs to the Serbian branch of the Sclaves.

For long the history of what later became the Bosnian kingdom is indistinguishable from that of the rest of the Serbs. The whole Illyrian triangle was divided into a great number of small independent districts, somewhat answering to the Teutonic ‘Gaus,’ called Župy. Župa means ‘bond’[4] or confederation, and each Župa was simply a confederation of village communities, whose union was represented by a magistrate or governor, called a Župan. The Župans in turn seem to have chosen a Grand-Župan, who may be looked on as the President of the Serbian Federation. We know little about the early Županships of the Bosnian area, but a few of the petty commonwealths of the Serbian coastland, and what later on became the Herzegovina, are mentioned by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote about 950, and the names and situation of some in the Bosnian interior may be gathered from ecclesiastical diplomas. Here and there we read of a ‘Ban’ (translated, in Diocleas, by the Latin word ‘Dux’), who was rather higher than an ordinary Župan.

These Serbian ‘Archons,’ as the Byzantine historians speak of them, acknowledged the suzerainty of the Eastern Empire, and even, in some cases (though doubtless to a less extent than the Croats), accepted Byzantine dignities. Thus a Ban of Zachlumia accepted the titles of Proconsul and Patrician. Later on, when Czar Simeon erected the new Bulgarian Empire, Serbia was forced for a while to bow to the dominion of the conqueror of Leo Phocas. In the tenth century the Serbs shake off the Bulgarian yoke, and we now begin to hear of four Grand-Župans, whose jurisdictions answer to Serbia proper, Rascia, Dioclea, and Bosnia. The power of the lesser Župans was during this period being diminished for the benefit of these greater potentates, who in Bosnia are generally known as Bans. ‘The Bans,’ says the contemporary Serbian historian,[5] ‘ruled each of them in his own province, and subjugated the Župans, receiving from them the taxes which beforetime had been paid to the King,’ i.e. the sole Grand-Župan.

During the ninth and tenth centuries, while Bosnian-Serbian history is still so obscure, that of the Croats had achieved some prominence. The settlement of the Croats had, as we have seen, somewhat preceded the Serbian. They bordered on the coast-cities of Dalmatia, where Roman nationality and something of Roman civilization still lingered. Their relations with Byzantium were more defined, and they had also for a moment entered into the system of the renovated Empire of the West. Thus the Croats were earlier imbued with Christianity than the Serbs, and external influences were earlier at work to give their too acephalous government greater unity than their inland neighbours, still under the full sway of Sclavonic communism, could attain to. In the year 914 a Croatian Grand-Župan, Tomislav, who, in virtue of his relations to the Byzantine government and the Roman population of the Dalmatian cities, had assumed the title of ‘Consul,’ begins to be known to foreign princes as ‘King of the Croats.’ The successor of Tomislav is said to have conquered the neighbouring Serbian Banat, which from the principal river within its confines begins about this time to be known as Bosona, or Bosnia. It even became a constitutional principle in Croatia that, when the king died childless, a new king should be elected by the seven Bans of the crown-lands, one of whom was the Ban of Bosnia.[6]

But this Croatian suzerainty was, as yet, premature. At the beginning of the eleventh century the Greek Emperor Basil having completed the slaughter of the Bulgarians succeeded in subjugating the Croats, and the introduction of Byzantine Governors and Protospathars into Dalmatia threw back Bosnia on to the support of her Serbian neighbours.[7] The Bosnian Ban Niklas not only accepted the Serbian Grand-Župan Dobroslav as his overlord, but aided him most efficaciously in annihilating two Byzantine armies[8] in those gorges of the Black Mountain which, from time immemorial, have been so fatal to the ambition of Stamboul.

Thus down to nearly the middle of the twelfth century, Bosnia continued to own allegiance to her Serbian suzerains, and the claims of the Croats to Bosnia continued to be little more than nominal till their own country fell into hands more capable of enforcing them. But at the beginning of the twelfth century the Magyars overthrew the kingdom of the Croats, and in 1141 Geiza II. of Hungary completed the conquest of Bosnia, or, as it is generally known in the Hungarian annals, of Rama, from the little river of that name, flowing into the Narenta.[9] Still, the Hungarian dominion does not seem as yet to have been much more than a vague suzerainty. Bosnia, indeed, throughout the whole of this period, seems to have stood aloof from all its neighbours. It might own a nominal allegiance, now to Serbia, now to Croatia, now to Hungary, but it enjoyed a practical independence. Its general isolation from the main current of Serbian history may be gathered from the chronicler of Dioclea; and when Manuel Comnenus reduced Hungary to a temporary subjection, his historian Cinnamus was struck with the same phenomenon. ‘The Drina,’ says he, ‘divides Bosthna from the rest of Serbia. For Bosthna is not subject to the Grand-Župan of Serbia, but the people were at that time under their own magistrates, and used their own customs.’ The recent Russian historian of the Serbs and Bulgarians[10] traces many of the later misfortunes of Bosnia to this fatal estrangement from the other Sclavonic lands.

The Hungarian alliance now makes this alienation irrevocable. Cinnamus shows the close relations existing between Bosnia and Hungary at the date of Manuel’s invasion when he goes on to say that ‘Boritzes,[11] Exarch of Bosthna,’ aided the King of Hungary against the Greeks; and, indeed, we know from other sources that the Bosnian Ban was himself an illegitimate son of the Magyar king, Coloman. Manuel reduced Bosnia, with Croatia and other parts of Hungary, for a while; but the Ban was not long in recovering the province. The Hungarian connection was only cemented the more firmly, and on Borić’s death, in 1168, his son, the new Ban Culin, accepted his investiture from Bela III., and subscribed himself henceforth Fiduciarius Regni Hungariæ.

The rule of Ban Culin is justly regarded as the brightest period in the annals of Christian Bosnia. His first care on his accession was to surround himself with trustworthy Župans and Voivodes, and during the thirty-six years of his reign Bosnia enjoyed a profound peace. Under his auspices and protection the merchants of Ragusa began to plant their factories in Bosnia, and open out anew the rich mines which had been left unworked since the days of the Romans. The very year after Culin’s accession, two Ragusan brothers built a factory and opened mines on the site of what has since become the capital of Bosnia.[12] Other mines were shortly opened in the neighbourhood, and a fortress, called after the Sclavonic name of their mother city, Dubrovnik, was built by the same enterprising merchants to protect their industries. The same wise policy encouraged another immigration, this time, of Saxon miners, who, like the Ragusans, did much to lay bare the great mineral wealth of this and the other Serbian lands, and who have left their traces in several old German mining expressions still current among the miners and mountaineers of Bosnia. These Saxons, or Sasi, settled chiefly in the towns, where their influence was valuable in instilling something of the civic unity of the free Teutonic burghs into the loosely compacted aggregation of hovels that clustered round the fortified ‘grad’ of the Bosnian lord.[13] Culin is said to have been the first Bosnian prince who struck coins, and the general prosperity was such that to this day ‘the times of good Ban Culin’ are invoked by the Bosniac when he wishes to express the golden age.

But the patronage which Culin afforded to a religious sect that now becomes prominent in Bosnia makes his rule of still greater importance, and leads us to the consideration of a subject which has its bearings even on English history.

The doctrine of the Two Principles of Good and Evil, which had its origin perhaps in the sublime mythology of Persia and the eternal conflict of Light and Darkness, held its own amongst the various Gnostic sects of Christianity, scattered throughout the Eastern world, while the West was content to slumber in comparative orthodoxy. In Armenia, where these doctrines had certain affinities with the earlier religion, they seem to have taken especially firm root; and here, as in the other border states of the Byzantine Empire, heterodoxy went hand in hand with patriotism. Considering the hostile relations in which both nations stood to Byzantium, it is not at all surprising that friendly communications should have subsisted between the Armenians and the Bulgarian Sclaves whose country lay to the east of the Serbians. Further, it was extremely natural that Armenians, for national as well as sectarian reasons, should view with jealousy the progress of orthodox missionaries among the Bulgarians, and should attempt to counteract it by organising a propaganda of their own Manichæism.

Such was actually set on foot. How early this proselytism was first commenced is doubtful, but it is certain that the Danubian Sclaves were converted from heathenism pari passu by Manichæan and orthodox missionaries. The Byzantine Emperors, by their transplantation system, gave the Armenians every facility for their work. In the middle of the eighth century Constantine Copronymus, who had perhaps some sympathies with the heretics, transplanted a body of Paulicians from Armenia into Thrace, who we learn, on the authority of Cedrenus, spread the Paulician heresy through those parts, then largely inhabited by the Bulgarian Sclaves. At the end of the ninth century, when the persecution of Byzantium had provoked the Paulicians of Armenia to assert their independence, when ‘the Roman Emperor fled before the heretics whom his mother had condemned to the flames,’ and Tephricé became the capital of a free-state devoted to Gnostic Christianity, the missionary efforts of the Armenians among the Sclaves was prosecuted with still greater vigour. Petrus Siculus, who in 870 resided nine months at Tephricé as legate of the Byzantine Government, to arrange for an exchange of prisoners, discovered that a Manichæan mission was about to start from Tephricé to the Bulgarians, and addressed his ‘Historia Manichæorum’ to the Bulgarian Patriarch, with the express purpose of counteracting these baneful efforts.

The fall of the Paulician free-state of Tephricé synchronizes with the rise of the first Bulgarian Empire, and we can well imagine that the refugees of vanquished Armenia found shelter among their Manichæan co-religionists in the dominions of Czar Simeon, the hero of the Achelous. From this period onwards the Paulician heresy may be said to change its nationality, and to become Sclavonic. According to the Bulgarian national traditions,[14] a certain priest named Bogomil spread the Manichæan doctrines among the subjects of the Bulgarian Czar who succeeded Simeon, Peter Simeonović. A more enlightened criticism will perhaps see in the name ‘Bogomil’ only another instance of that ‘eponymic’ tendency of barbarous minds which refers to individuals events and institutions which have really a more national character. In the same Bulgarian document which professes to give the origin of their name, they are connected with the Massalian heresy; by Harmenopulos and other Byzantine writers they are made almost or quite identical with these same Massalians, and with the Euchites, their Greek equivalent, and there seems to be no reasonable doubt that the name Bogomile is really nothing but a Sclavonic translation of the Greek and Syriac names for the sect. The name of Massalians is derived from a Syriac word, signifying ‘those who pray,’ and the Greek Euchites have of course the same derivation. The Byzantine writer Epiphanius[15] has the credit of giving the right etymology of the word Bogomile, in that he derives it from the Bulgarian words Bog z’milui, signifying ‘God have mercy,’ an etymology which fits in with that peculiar devotion to prayer which was characteristic of the Bogomilian religion, which harmonizes with that of the allied sectaries, the Massalians and Euchites, and which would be still intelligible to all Sclavonic peoples, from the White Sea to the Ægean.

We need not, however, go so far as to deny that the Bogomilian heresy took its characteristic shape under the direction of a Bulgarian heresiarch. The historic existence of the first Bogomilian pope seems sufficiently attested,[16] but the Bulgarian traditions name him indifferently Jeremias and Bogomil, and it is quite possible that the latter name was added at a later time by a confusion with the Sclavonic homonym for Massalians and Euchites.

Through all the varying phases of Bulgarian history the Bogomiles, as these Sclavonic Manichæans are now known, hold their own. It seems certain that the Bulgarian Czars, in their struggle with Byzantium, did not wish to alienate a powerful party at home, and we hear occasionally ominous whispers that Bulgarian Emperors themselves leaned towards the doctrine of the Two Principles.[17] The Bulgarian heresy was perpetually fed from its Oriental sources by new Byzantine transplantations, and in the tenth century the Emperor John Zimisces did much for the propagation of Gnosticism among the Sclaves by transporting a more powerful colony of Armenians than any that had gone before ‘from the Chalybian hills to the valleys of Mount Hæmus.’ It is now that the Bogomilian heresy begins to spread beyond the limits of Bulgaria, among the kindred Serbian tribes to the west. Bulgaria, earlier civilized from her closer contact with Byzantium, was exercising during these centuries a predominating influence over the less cultured Serbs. From the Bulgarian missionaries Serbia first received the seeds of her orthodox Christianity, and there can be no doubt that proselytism was at work on the Manichæan side as well. Add to this that a large part of Serbia fell at different times under the Bulgarian dominion.

By the end of the tenth century the Bogomiles have taken firm root among the Serbs. In the legend of the Serbian prince, St. Vladimir,[18] one of his highest merits is that he was the zealous enemy of the Bogomiles. St. Vladimir certainly included in his dominions parts of what is now the Herzegovina, and, according to some accounts, Bosnia as well.

The events which now follow must have largely increased the number of Manichæans in these and the other Serbian lands. Basil, ‘the slayer of the Bulgarians,’ at the beginning of the eleventh century, finally overthrew the first Bulgarian Empire. Towards the end of the same century the Bulgarian heretics, now under Byzantine rule, were hunted down by the orthodox Emperor. The Princess Anna Comnena[19] has left us an account of the persecution of the Bogomiles by her father Alexius. The Byzantine princess unblushingly relates the trap which the Emperor condescended to set for the chief apostle of the sect, at that time a certain Basil; how he artfully led on the heresiarch by holding out hopes of conversion; how he invited him to the imperial table, and in his closet wormed out of him the secrets of his sect; and then, suddenly throwing aside the arras on the wall, revealed the scribe who had taken down the confession of his heresy, and beckoned to his apparitors to throw his victim into irons. The account which Anna Comnena gives of this sect is valuable in spite of its scurrility. The princess calls the Bogomiles ‘a mixture of Manichees and Massalians.’ She laughs at their uncombed hair, their low origin,[20] and their long faces, ‘which they hide to the nose, and walk bowed, attired like monks, muttering something between their lips.’ Basil himself was ‘a lanky man, with a sparse beard, tall and thin.’ From the account given of his confession we have intimations of a belief in the phantastic doctrine, and what was more shocking still, ‘He called the sacred churches—woe is me!—the sacred churches, fanes of demons!’ When he saw himself betrayed by the Emperor, he declared that he would be rescued from death by ‘angels and demons.’ Anna Comnena would like to say more of this cursed heresy, ‘but modesty keeps me from doing so, as beautiful Sappho says somewhere; for though I am an historian, I am also a woman, and the most honourable of the purple, and the first offshoot of Alexius.’ The ‘most honourable of the purple,’ however, feels no hesitation in describing the holocaust which her father made of all the Bogomiles he could catch, and more particularly the roasting of Basil. This delicately sensitive princess gloats over the preparations in the hippodrome, the crackling of the fire, the breaking out of poor human nature as the victim comes nearer to the scorching, the turning away of his eyes, and finally the quivering of his limbs. One asks, in amazement, whether any religion that has ever existed in the world has produced such monsters of humanity as Christianity calling itself orthodox!

It may readily be believed that these persecutions drove the Bogomiles to take refuge more and more in the Serbian regions, out of the way of the orthodox savagery of Byzantium. There were moreover reasons which diverted the current of heresy from that part of Serbia which became afterwards the nucleus of the Empire of the Némanjas. The Serbian princes who ruled over the territory now occupied by old Serbia and Montenegro were faithful sons of the orthodox church, and directed their utmost efforts to keep the shrine of St. Vladimir and the national patriarchate of Dioclea free from the contamination of Manichæism. Thus a variety of causes combined to direct the course of the new movement to the Serbian races of Western Illyricum; and in the twelfth century—the century immediately preceding the outbreak of Gnostic Puritanism in Western Europe—Bosnia had become the head-quarters of what we may now call the great Sclavonic Heresy.

Thanks to the publication of many South-Sclavonic archives, we are now in a position to arrive at the tenets of the Bogomiles, from native as well as from Byzantine sources; and, as I hope to show, both the Greek and Sclavonic accounts of the sect which now plays such an important part in Bosnian history harmonize to a very great extent. The best native account that we possess of the Bogomilian heretics is to be found in the works of a Bulgarian writer, one Presbyter Cosmas, who lived at the end of the tenth century, just at the period when the heresy was striking root among the Serbs and Bosniacs, and who wrote (in his native tongue) two of his most important works against the Bogomiles—whom he considers ‘worse and more horrible than demons!’[21]

One of the fundamental doctrines of the Bogomiles was, as has been already implied, the belief in two Principles of Good and Evil. ‘I hear,’ says the worthy Presbyter Cosmas, ‘many of our orthodox congregation ask, “Wherefore does God permit the Devil to exercise sway over man?” Verily this is the first question which prepares the weak in belief for the reception of the Manichæan heresy.’ The Bogomiles satisfied their reason by supposing two conflicting self-existent principles of Good and Evil. Matter and the visible world belong to the Spirit of Evil. ‘Everything,’ says Cosmas, ‘exists, according to the Bogomiles, of the will of the Devil. The sky, the sun, the earth, men, churches, crosses, and all that is God’s, they give over to the Devil.’ The evil in the world is thus accounted for by supposing the Creation to be the work of the Evil One, and it consequently followed that the Bogomiles looked on the book of Genesis and the other Mosaic writings as inspired by this evil God, or, as they knew him, Satanael. But beyond this visible world, of which they could see only the dark and melancholy side, there existed, according to the Bogomiles, another, invisible, heavenly and perfect, the creation of the Spirit of Goodness and Light—Himself a perfect triune Being, from whom proceeded nothing incomplete or temporary.

Cosmas distinguishes, however, two branches of the Bogomilian heretics.

According to the earlier sect, dualism in its most uncompromising form prevailed.[22] According to a later offshoot of the Bogomiles, the Spirit of Good had two sons, the elder of whom, Satanael, rebelled and created matter, and that to rescue the world thus created from the dominion of the Prince of Evil, God the Father sent down his younger son Christ to enable men to combat the Ruler of this world.[23] Both sects, however, were agreed in accepting the Phantastic theory of the Incarnation. The antagonism between spirit and matter was too great to admit of the union of the two. The body of Christ was a phantom, left in the clouds at his ascension; and the Virgin was an angel and not the mother of God.

Cosmas denies generally their belief in any of the books of the Old Testament or the Gospels; but this does not agree with the circumstantial account of Euthymius Zygabenus, who from having been commissioned by the Emperor to extract the tenets of his sect from the Bogomilian heresiarch Basil, is certainly one of the best authorities. Further, it is disproved by the whole conduct of the Bogomiles, which, as Cosmas himself shows, was based on a too literal interpretation of the Gospels. According to Euthymius,[24] the Bogomiles accepted seven holy books, which he enumerates as follows:—1, the Psalms; 2, the Sixteen Prophets; 3, 4, 5, and 6, the Gospels; 7, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse. So far, indeed, as the New Testament was concerned, they clung to the version of the orthodox Sclavic apostle, in which they altered not a word.[25]

Touching baptism again, accounts are contradictory. Harmenopulos says that the Bogomiles practised the rite, but did not attribute to it any perfecting[26] virtue. On the other hand, the most recent investigations into the observances of the Bogomiles of Bosnia show that strictly speaking the rite did not exist among them at all, though they observed something analogous to it. Only adults could be admitted into the communion of the faithful; and, after they had first qualified themselves for admission by prayer and fasting, the mystery of initiation was performed, not by water—for did not water itself appertain to the evil realm of matter?—but by the laying on of St. John’s Gospel. Thus Cosmas is technically right in saying that the Bogomiles rejected baptism altogether, though it is probable that he was merely calumniating them when he added as a reason, that ‘they are afraid of the children to be baptized; and if by chance they see small children, they turn away from them as from carrion, and spit, and call them children of mammon, as being creations of the Devil;’ still under the sway, that is, of the Evil Creator Spirit. As regards Bosnia, at any rate, this is a foul slander. So far were the Bosnian Bogomiles from spurning little children, that the instruction of the young was considered a work worthy of the most saintly of the sect.

They were staunch opponents of the prevailing Mariolatry. ‘They pay no honour to the Mother of God.’[27] ‘As to the cross,’ says the Presbyter, they say: ‘Wherefore should we bow to that which dishonoured God?’ and they ask further, ‘if any man slew the son of a king with a bit of wood, how could this bit of wood be dear to the king?’[28] They considered it idolatry to bow down before the icons of saints. ‘They further revile the ceremonies of the church and all church dignities, and they call orthodox priests blind Pharisees, and bay at them as dogs at horses.’[29] ‘As to the Lord’s Supper,’ continues the Bulgarian champion of orthodoxy, ‘they assert that it is not kept according to God’s commandment, and that it is not the body of God, but ordinary bread.’[30]

Their belief in the evilness of matter was productive, as such a belief always has been, of much asceticism; which, if the concurrent testimony of their enemies is to be believed, they carried at times to deplorable excesses. ‘They show themselves,’ says Cosmas, ‘strong ascetics, for they call the Devil the Creator of all things, and declare that it is his Commandment that men should take wives, eat flesh, and drink wine. Everything as it exists with us (the orthodox) is utterly rejected. They give themselves up to a celestial life, insomuch that they call married men and those living in the way of the world “Mammon’s Children.”’ The descriptions of Anna Comnena and the monk Cosmas bring before us the familiar Puritan type, as it has reproduced itself in all ages. They bowed their heads and groaned and pulled long faces, in the true Roundhead style. ‘You will see heretics,’ quoth Cosmas, ‘quiet and peaceful as lambs without, silent, and wan with hypocritical fasting, who do not speak much nor laugh loud, who let their beard grow, and leave their person incompt.’

These descriptions of their enemies must, however, be taken with this reserve: they apply, as a rule, only to a small minority of the sect. The Bogomiles, like most ascetic sects, were divided into two castes: the simple believers, the Credentes of the West, who formed the large majority; and ‘the perfect,’ or those who by a long course of asceticism had successfully mortified the flesh. In the thirteenth century, at the most blooming period of their history, among the millions of these sectaries were reckoned less than 4,000 of ‘the perfect.’[31] These ‘perfect’ called themselves in Bosnia Krstjani, dobri Bošniani, Svršiteli, ‘Christians,’ that is, ‘good Bosnians,’ or ‘the elect,’ terms which reappear in a Romance guise in Italy and the Languedoc. The ‘perfect’ were clad like monks in long black gowns; they condemned themselves to perpetual celibacy; they abjured wine, nor tasted aught but vegetables, fish, and oil; they forsook the ‘pomps and vanities of this wicked world,’ and gave themselves up to devotion and good works. The women (for this saintly minority included both sexes) taught children or tended the sick, while the men acted as the spiritual guides of their weaker brethren or preached the Gospel among unbelievers.

But it stood to reason that the great bulk of the Bogomilian flock could never attain to this higher standard. In the abstract, no doubt, the simple ‘believer’ accepted the doctrine which his spiritual guides were careful to instil into him, that his soul was an angel fallen from above and fettered in the prison-house of his body, and that only by perpetual mortification of the flesh could he hope to set the celestial captive free at last. But the laws of nature and society are perpetually holding back religious extravagance from its logical consequences, and the simple ‘believer’ was content to govern himself by the more ordinary standard of mankind. As in Provence and Italy, so in Bosnia, he dispensed himself from the prohibition against drinking wine; and though the ‘perfect’ refused to bear arms and preached against war as devilish, the mass of the heretics, Sclavonic as well as Romance, showed that on occasion they could measure swords with the most orthodox. Though marriage was contrary to their tenets, the Bogomiles took wives, the man, however, in Bosnia only taking the woman on the condition that she was good and true to him, reserving the right of dismissing her if he thought her conduct unsatisfactory; an arrangement productive of laxity, and giving occasion to the orthodox adversary of which he was not slow to take advantage.[32] Yet, though in his manner of life falling short of the extreme asceticism of ‘the perfect,’ the ordinary Bogomile, on the showing of his enemies themselves, distinguished himself by his superior industry and thrift, and put to shame the saintly idleness of more orthodox professors by refusing to neglect his work on feast-days. Among the Bogomiles, beggars were looked on with contempt.[33] The ‘perfect’ themselves abhorred what was slothful in a monastic life, and the ‘heresiarch’ Basil set a good example by earning his living as a doctor. The simple believer devoted part of the worldly goods thus acquired to the relief of sick and indigent brothers, and also to the support of Gospellers among unbelievers, but neither his industry nor his good works could satisfy his conscience. The higher life of the ‘perfect’ was a perpetual reproach to him. His soul seemed clotted with the contagion of a too sensual existence, nor did his theology allow him a purgatory for the imbodied and imbruted spirit. Standing on the threshold of another world, and forced to choose between heaven and hell, the simple ‘believer’ considered it essential to his salvation that he should be admitted into the ranks of the ‘perfect’ by a death-bed ceremony of initiation, which reappears as la Convenenza among the more Western Patarenes of Italy and Provence.

The Bogomiles, in spite of their hatred of orthodox priests and temples, possessed ministers and even conventicles of their own. In the earliest accounts that have reached us we find at the head of the sect an elder or teacher surrounded by twelve disciples, answering to Christ and the Apostles. The half legendary accounts of the ‘pope’ Bogomil surround him with such disciples; and Basil ‘the heresiarch’ has his twelve. But as the Bogomiles spread beyond the limits of Bulgaria, each new province, if we may so term it, added to the dominion of the faithful, required a new elder or bishop. At the head of the Bogomilian flock in Bosnia stood a Djed or elder, answering to the Episcopus or Senior of the Albigensians, and under him came the Apostles, the Strojniks (Western Magistri), of which there were two grades, the Gosti and the Starci, who again reappear as the Filii and Diaconi of Italy. But there was no hierarchy, and nothing at all answering to a papacy; ‘the ecclesiastical officers were simply the representatives of the congregation, and were chosen by their votes.’[34] Every one who ranked among the ‘perfect,’ whether a man or woman, had the right of preaching.

Although in some parts the Bogomiles seem to have had no recognized place of worship, and performed their devotions in their own huts, or on some lonely heath beneath the open canopy of heaven, we have yet sufficient evidence, both Byzantine and Sclavonic, that they often possessed meeting-houses of their own. Their churches, according to Epiphanius, were like boats turned keel uppermost, but some were of a more ecclesiastical form. It appears that in Bosnia, as in the Languedoc, their prayer-houses were plain sheds without tower, or bells, which they called the trumpets of demons,—devoid of ornament or icons, containing neither chancel nor altar, but a simple table covered with a clean white linen cloth, on which was laid a copy of the Gospels.[35] Here they assembled by torchlight and sang hymns of their own, called by the Greek writer ‘Euphemies.’ Their service chiefly consisted of prayer, which according to their creed was the only means of resisting the demon within them, or of attaining salvation. The Lord’s Prayer was the only form used by them, and this they repeated in their own house with closed doors, five times every day and five times every night.[36]

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]

But at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Hungarians had once more recovered their ascendency in Bosnia, and the Pope eagerly seized the weapon of orthodoxy at his service. John XXII. directed two letters, one to Charles, King of Hungary, and the other to Stephen, Ban of Bosnia. The letters are almost identical in scope, and are interesting as showing that Bosnia was still the stronghold and asylum of European heresy, and as illustrating the peculiar character of these sectaries. The letter to the Bosnian Ban is dated Avignon, June 1325.[65] ‘To our beloved son and nobleman, Stephen, Prince of Bosnia,’—‘Knowing that thou art a faithful son of the church, we therefore charge thee to exterminate the heretics in thy dominions, and to render aid and assistance unto Fabian, our Inquisitor, for as much as a large multitude of heretics, from many and divers parts collected, hath flowed together into the principality of Bosnia, trusting there to sow their obscene errors and to dwell there in safety. These men, imbued with the cunning of the Old Fiend, and armed with the venom of their falseness, corrupt the minds of Catholics by outward show of simplicity and lying assumption of the name of Christians; their speech crawleth like a crab, and they creep in with humility, but in secret they kill, and are wolves in sheeps’ clothing, covering their bestial fury as a means whereby they may deceive the simple sheep of Christ.’

The true believers still need to be warned against the apparent meekness and innocence of these men of the gospel! His Holiness seems almost to be repeating the description of the Bogomiles given by the Bulgarian Presbyter over three centuries before. ‘When men,’ says Cosmas, ‘see their lowly behaviour, then think they that they are of true belief; they approach them therefore and consult them about their souls’ health. But they, like wolves that will swallow up a lamb, bow their head, sigh, and answer full of humility, and set themselves up as if they knew how it is ordered in heaven.’[66] Hypocritical meekness has been a ready accusation in the mouths of opponents of puritanism in all ages; but we may be allowed to see, in the slanders of foul-mouthed popes and prelates, a tribute to the evangelic purity of the lives of those whom they persecuted and traduced.

Once more ‘the Lilies of the Field,’ as in their figurative parlance they loved to style themselves, are trampled under foot. In 1330 the King of Hungary and the Ban combined to assist the Inquisitor Fabian; many heretics were hounded from the realm, and the usual scenes of horror were repeated. In 1337, however, heresy is again as rampant as ever in Bosnia, and the Pope accordingly stirred up the neighbouring princes to another Bosnian crusade, which was only averted by the address of the Ban Stephen.

Sometimes the monks condescended to work miracles to forward the work of conversion. One, while addressing a congregation of heretics, ‘stepped,’ we are assured, ‘into a large fire, and with great hilarity stood in the middle of the flames while he recited the fiftieth Psalm.’ We hardly need the further assurance that many were turned from the error of their ways by miracles like this, especially when it is remembered that the heretics had the alternative of repenting, or repeating the experiment.

Nor were there wanting, we are told, miraculous tokens in the sky to manifest the displeasure of heaven itself at these scoffers at Catholic verity. The mountains whither the Bogomiles had been driven by the pious zeal of Ban Stephen were struck by celestial fire. ‘Upon the eve of St. Catharine, 1367, a mighty heavenly flame appeared in the East, with an intense light terribly apparent to the whole globe. At that time they say that the loftiest mountains of Bosnia, with all rocks, cattle, wild beasts, and fowls of the air, were miraculously consumed, so that they were reduced to a plain; and there dwell the Patarene Manichæans, and say that God burnt up those mountains for their convenience, because He loved their faith.’[67] In fact, neither the Bogomiles nor the new Ban Stephen Tvartko, who favoured them, seem to have been the least appalled by this phenomenon. Only two years after this miraculous conflagration, Urban V. writes to the King of Hungary to complain of the Ban of Bosnia, ‘who, following in the detestable footsteps of his fathers, fosters and defends the heretics who flow together into these parts from divers corners of the world as into a sink of iniquity.’[68] The Bans of Bosnia, even when Catholics themselves, seem to have been forced by the strength of national feeling into an attitude at least of toleration towards the Bogomiles, and their position in this respect has been aptly compared by Hilferding to that of the Bulgarian Czars.

During the troublous times of the Bosnian kingdom the Bogomiles increased in strength, and, what is extremely significant, the heretics of Bosnia begin to play a part in the revival of the Protestant movement throughout Europe. We do not know what part the Sclavonic heretics of Bosnia may have taken in preparing the minds of their Czechian brothers for the religious revolt of which Huss and Jerome of Prague were the leaders and exponents. But we do know that from the first intimate relations existed between the Bogomiles of Bosnia and the Hussites; in 1433 four Bogomilian or Patarene bishops made their way from Bosnia to the Council of Basil,[69] and shortly after, in 1437, the Romish bishop Joseph complains that Bosnia was swarming with Hussites and other heretics. We have, moreover, very strong indirect evidence that the movement in Bosnia was at this time directed by men of learning and ability. In 1462 Pius II., being much alarmed at the progress of heresy in Bosnia, and ‘hearing that there was a great want there of men skilled in philosophy, the sacred canons, and theology,’ sent thither ‘learned men from the neighbouring provinces,’ and especially the brother Peter de Mili, a native of Bosnia, and four fellows. These five ‘had studied in the best Cismontane and Transmontane Universities under the most learned doctors.’ The Pope, moreover, gave orders that some of the largest convents should be converted into schools for literary studies.[70] We may conclude with confidence that learning was required in Bosnia to cope with learning.

But the preparation of this polemic artillery was cut short by an event, the effects of which are even now distracting Christendom. In the year following that in which his Holiness laments over the continued progress of heresy in Bosnia, the whole country passed in the short space of eight days irrevocably under the dominion of the Infidel. The continued crusades, the persecutions of the Inquisition—fire, sword, exile, and dungeon—had done their work. The Protestant population of Bosnia had at last deliberately taken its choice, and preferred the dominion of what it believed to be the more tolerant Turks to the ferocious tyranny of Catholic kings, magnates, and monks. There never was a clearer instance of the Nemesis which follows on the heels of religious persecution. Europe has mainly to thank the Church of Rome that an alien civilisation and religion has been thrust into her midst, and that Bosnia at the present day remains Mahometan.

At the very moment when the Turks were threatening the existence of the Bosnian kingdom, the King, then Stephen Tomašević, and priests, aided by the magnates and aristocratic party in the State, were pushing the persecution of the Bogomiles to an extreme which perhaps it had never reached before. In the year 1459 King Stephen turned his feudal arms against the inoffensive Bogomiles at home, and hounded out as many, it is said,[71] as forty thousand, who took refuge in the Herzegovina, with their co-religionist, the Duke of St. Sava. Others he sent in chains to Rome, where it appears they were ‘benignantly converted’—whatever that means. But the expulsion of forty thousand did little to diminish the strength of the Bogomiles in Bosnia. In 1462, as we know from the Roman archives, heresy was as powerful as ever in Bosnia. Already, twelve years before,[72] the Bogomiles had invited the Turks into Bosnia as their deliverers; in 1463 the invitation was repeated, a successful negotiation was opened with the Sultan, and, on Mahomet II.’s invasion, the Catholic king found himself deserted by his people. The keys of the principal fortress, the royal city of Bobovac, were handed over to the Turk by the ‘Manichæan’ governor;[73] the other fortresses and towns hastened to imitate its example, and within a week ‘seventy cities defended by nature and art’ passed into the hands of Mahomet. Bosnia, which may be described as one vast stronghold, refused to strike a blow in defence of her priestly tyrants.

Perhaps enough has been said to show the really important part played by Bosnia in European history. We have seen her aid in interpreting to the West the sublime puritanism which the more Eastern Sclaves of Bulgaria had first received from the Armenian missionaries. We have seen her take the lead in the first religious revolt against Rome. We have seen a Bosnian religious teacher directing the movement in Provence. We have seen the Protestants of Bosnia successfully resisting all the efforts of Rome, supported by the arms of Hungary, to put them down. We have seen them offering an asylum to their persecuted brothers of the West,—Albigensians, Patarenes, and Waldenses. We have seen them connected with the Reformation in Bohemia, and affording shelter to the followers of Huss. From the twelfth century to the final conquest of the Turks in the sixteenth, when the fight of religious freedom had been won in Northern Europe, Bosnia presents the unique phenomenon of a Protestant State existing within the limits of the Holy Roman Empire, and in a province claimed by the Roman Church. Bosnia was the religious Switzerland of Mediæval Europe, and the signal service which she has rendered to the freedom of the human intellect by her successful stand against authority can hardly be exaggerated. Resistance, broken down in the gardens of Provence, buried beneath the charred rafters of the Roman cities of the Langue d’Oc, smothered in the dungeons of the Inquisition, was prolonged from generation to generation amongst the primeval forests and mountain fastnesses of Bosnia. There were not wanting, amongst those who sought to exterminate the Bogomiles, Churchmen as dead to human pity as the Abbot of Citeaux, and lay arms as bloodthirsty as De Montfort; but the stubborn genius of the Serbian people fought on with rare persistence, and held out to the end. The history of these champions of a purer religion has been written by their enemies, and ignored by those who owe most to their heroism. No Martyrology of the Bogomiles of Bosnia has come down to us. We have no Huss or Tyndale to arrest our pity. ‘Invidious silence’ has obscured their fame,