In the 900s, in a Bulgaria exhausted by war and ruled by a weakening tsar, a priest began preaching in village homes. He told people to stop going to church. He said the clergy were liars, the icons were dead wood, and the material world itself was built by the devil. His name was Bogomil, which means “dear to God” in Old Slavonic. Over the next five centuries, his movement would spread across the Balkans, terrify two empires, seed the Cathar heresy in western Europe, and leave its trace on the English language in a way no one expected.
The World That Made a Heresy
Bulgaria in the mid-tenth century was a place designed to make people angry. Tsar Peter I (r. 927-969) had inherited an empire from his father Simeon I, who had spent decades waging expensive wars against Byzantium and building lavish palaces at the capital Preslav. The wars were over. The bills were not.
The boyars, Bulgaria’s landed nobility, tightened their grip on the peasantry. Church officials, who had been generously endowed by Simeon, lived in visible luxury while ordinary people paid higher taxes to support both state and church. Bulgaria had only been Christian since 865, when Prince Boris I accepted baptism from Constantinople. That was less than a century before Bogomil started preaching. The conversion was still raw, the old Slavic beliefs still close to the surface, and the new religion’s promise of spiritual equality looked increasingly hollow when delivered by bishops who ate well and dressed better.
To make things worse, the Paulicians arrived.
The Paulicians were an Armenian dualist sect that had been causing trouble for the Byzantine Empire for centuries. Their theology was uncompromising: two gods, one good, one evil. The material world belonged to the evil one. The Old Testament was his scripture. They rejected icons, crosses, relics, and the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy. In 747, Emperor Constantine V had resettled large numbers of Paulicians from eastern Anatolia to Thrace to defend the frontier. In 970, Emperor John I Tzimiskes relocated a much larger population to the area around Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv). By the time Anna Komnene wrote in the late eleventh century, Philippopolis and its surroundings were, she said, “entirely inhabited by Paulicians.”
These Paulician communities did not quietly assimilate. They proselytized. And they settled right in the middle of a population that was already furious at its own church.
When Tsar Peter wrote to the Patriarch of Constantinople, Theophylactus, around 950 asking about a disturbing new movement in his lands, the Patriarch replied that it sounded like “Manichaeism mixed with Paulicianism.” He was close. But Bogomilism would turn out to be something new.
The Priest and His Critic
Almost everything we know about early Bogomilism comes from a single text: the Sermon Against the Heretics by Cosmas the Priest, written around 970 in Bulgaria. Cosmas was an Orthodox clergyman, and he was furious. But he was also, to his credit, one of the few medieval polemicists honest enough to attack both sides.
The first half of his sermon tears into the Bogomils. The second half tears into his own church.
On the Bogomils, Cosmas is vivid. He describes people who look pious on the surface: “Externally these heretics are like sheep: meek, humble and quiet; they appear pale from their hypocritical fasting. They don’t utter excessive words, they don’t laugh loudly and are not inquisitive. But internally they are wolves and predators.”
Then he describes what they actually taught: “They teach their people not to submit to their rulers; they malign the rich; they hate the tsar; they mock their local chiefs; they blame the nobility; they consider those who work for the tsar hateful to God; and they command every servant not to serve his master.”
This was not just a theological quarrel. This was politics. The Bogomils weren’t simply offering a different way to pray. They were telling peasants that the entire social order was illegitimate.
But Cosmas doesn’t stop there. He turns on his own clergy with equal force, accusing them of “drunkenness and theft,” denouncing bishops for luxury and neglect, criticizing monks who “travel abroad to Rome and Jerusalem, returning home to boast of their travels.” He makes the connection explicit: the failures of the Orthodox church created the conditions for heresy.
The name “Bogomil” is a compound of the Old Slavonic words bog (god) and mil (dear): “dear to God.” It is the exact Slavic equivalent of the Greek name Theophilos. Whether it was the priest’s given name or a title the movement adopted is still debated. Cosmas, with a polemicist’s instinct, made a point of noting that the founder “is actually not dear to God.”
How the World Was Made Wrong
The Bogomil creation myth survives in a remarkable text called the Interrogatio Iohannis, the Book of the Secret Supper. It presents itself as a private conversation between the apostle John and Jesus at a secret meal in heaven. John asks how the world began. What Jesus tells him is very different from Genesis.
God the Father had two sons. The elder was Satanael. The younger was Michael, who would later become Christ. Satanael held the highest position in heaven, sitting at the right hand of God as His steward. But Satanael grew proud. He persuaded a third of the angels to abandon their duties, promising them freedom from heavenly service. God cast them all out.
Expelled from heaven, Satanael built his own world. He shaped the earth, the sun, the sky. He formed Adam out of clay and water. But he hit a fundamental problem: he could shape matter, but he could not give it life. Adam lay there, a lifeless figure of mud.
What happened next depends on which version of the text you read. In one account, Satanael negotiated with God, sending an embassy to the Father asking for “a little life for Adam,” promising that the living man would be “shared between them.” God agreed and breathed spirit into Adam. In another version, the life kept “trickling out of Adam’s right foot and forefinger in the shape of a serpent.” In a third, Adam remained lifeless for three hundred years while Satanael wandered the earth eating unclean animals, then returned and vomited the defiled matter into Adam’s mouth.
All versions agree on the outcome: human beings are composite creatures. Bodies made by the devil, souls belonging to God. We are, as the text puts it, “the production of two creators.”
Adam was allowed to tend the earth on one condition: he signed a covenant with Satanael, selling himself and all his descendants to the “owner of the Earth.” This contract was recorded on a clay tablet called the hierographon. Satanael then manifested as the serpent and seduced Eve, ensuring that reproduction would continue to trap divine sparks in material bodies.
To break this covenant, God sent His younger son Michael in human form. At the baptism in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit descended as a dove, and Jesus received the power to shatter the clay tablet and free humanity from Satanael’s contract. And in the final act, Christ stripped Satanael of the suffix -el, which signified divinity. The suffix appears in Micha-el, Gabri-el, Rapha-el. Without it, Satanael became simply Satan: powerful still, but no longer divine.
This is what the Bogomils taught in village homes across Bulgaria. It is not Genesis. It is not orthodox Christianity. It is something older and stranger, a story about a world that was made wrong from the start and a God who had to rescue His own creation from His own first son.
Two surviving manuscripts of the Interrogatio Iohannis have come down to us: one in the Austrian National Library in Vienna (12th-13th century), one from the Inquisition archives in Carcassonne (14th century). A postscript added by the Inquisitors to the Carcassonne copy reads: “This is the Secret of the heretics of Concorrezzo, brought from Bulgaria by Nazarials, their bishop. It is full of errors.”
Worship Without Walls
Bogomils did not build churches. They considered their own bodies to be the temple. Gatherings took place in private homes, centered on scripture and the Lord’s Prayer, which they recited many times daily. New adherents received a spiritual baptism through the laying on of hands rather than water baptism. They rejected icons, relics, altars, oil, and every material sacrament.
They rejected the cross with an argument that was both logical and deliberately provocative. Cosmas records it: “If someone killed the tsar’s son with a piece of wood, would the tsar consider that wood sacred? It is the same with the cross and God.” The cross was the instrument of torture used to kill Christ. Venerating it was, to the Bogomils, exactly as absurd as venerating a murder weapon. Some of them went further. Cosmas notes that heretics would “chop crosses for tools,” using the sacred wood for mundane purposes. This was deliberate desacralization.
The community had two tiers. An inner circle of “perfect” teachers lived in strict asceticism: celibacy, fasting, vegetarianism, plain dress, refusal of oaths. They traveled in pairs, modeled the ideal life, and performed the laying on of hands. A wider circle of sympathizers supported them, kept household devotions, and lived by a simpler ethic. The model was not a monastery. It was closer to early Christianity before Constantine: small cells of committed believers scattered through a hostile society.
What made this dangerous to the state was not the theology. It was the structure. A church that doesn’t own buildings can’t be shut down by confiscating buildings. A priesthood that has no vestments can’t be identified by its clothing. A community that meets in homes and refuses oaths cannot be bound by feudal contracts. The Bogomils weren’t just rejecting the church’s doctrine. They were rejecting the entire institutional framework that held medieval society together.
The Emperor’s Trap
The story of Basil the Physician is one of the most dramatic episodes in Byzantine religious history. It comes to us from Anna Komnene’s Alexiad, and it reads like a spy novel.
By the early twelfth century, Bogomilism had penetrated Constantinople itself. Emperor Alexios I Komnenos learned through interrogation of a captured sect member that the movement’s leader was a man named Basil, who styled himself a physician. Basil had selected twelve teachers to serve as his “apostles,” mirroring the original twelve disciples.
Alexios decided not to arrest Basil outright. Instead, he laid a trap. He summoned Basil to the palace and pretended to be genuinely interested in Bogomil teaching. He played the role of a potential convert, asking questions, expressing sympathy, drawing Basil out. Basil, convinced the emperor was ready for conversion, held nothing back. He explained the full Bogomil cosmology, listed his objections to the Orthodox Church, and described the organization of his movement in detail.
Throughout the entire conversation, a secretary was hidden behind a curtain, writing down every word.
When Basil finished, Alexios pulled back the curtain. Behind it sat the Patriarch of Constantinople, members of the Senate, and the assembled clergy. Basil had given a full, documented confession.
The trial was a formality. Basil refused to recant. Alexios ordered two enormous pyres built in the Hippodrome. One had a cross placed before it. The other did not. A mixed group of suspected Bogomils and Orthodox Christians was brought before the fires and told to choose which to approach. Those who walked toward the fire with the cross were recognized as Orthodox and pulled to safety. Those who chose the fire without the cross identified themselves as Bogomils and were imprisoned.
Basil himself was offered a final choice: recant and approach the cross, or face the flames. Anna Komnene reports that he initially showed contempt, claiming angels would descend from heaven to rescue him. But when he saw the actual fire, he wavered, turning away and gesturing frantically. He still refused to recant. The executioners threw him into the flames.
The date is debated. Anna places the episode near the end of her father’s reign, which would put it around 1110-1118. What is not debated is the message: the empire would burn heretics in its most public arena to make a point.
Bogomilism survived anyway.
Fire and Flight
The Hippodrome was not the only fire. Bogomils burned across the Balkans for centuries.
In Serbia, Grand Župan Stefan Nemanja convened a church-state council against the heresy around 1176 at the old Church of St. Peter in Ras. The verdict was comprehensive: Bogomil books were burned, their leader had his tongue cut out, religious elders were burned at the stake, remaining believers were expelled with their property confiscated. Even mentioning the Bogomils’ name was forbidden. We know this from Nemanja’s own son, Stefan the First-Crowned, who wrote his father’s biography. The surviving Bogomils fled south and west, many of them into Bosnia, where the religious landscape was less tightly controlled and heterodox Christianity would persist for centuries. For more on what they found there, see The Bosnian Church: heretics, Christians, or something older?
In Bulgaria, Tsar Boril convened a synod at Tarnovo on 11 February 1211 that added Bogomils to the formal roster of anathematized heresies. The resulting document, the Synodikon of Tsar Boril, adapted the Byzantine Synodikon of Orthodoxy (originally issued in 843 to end Iconoclasm) to Bulgarian conditions. It was read aloud on the Feast of Orthodoxy and updated for centuries afterward, surviving in two manuscripts now held at the Sts. Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia. UNESCO inscribed it on the Memory of the World Register in 2017.
None of these measures killed the movement. Bogomils adapted, dispersed, and dissolved into local dissenting traditions. Home worship is hard to suppress when you can’t see it happening.
Meanwhile, the ideas were traveling west.
When East Met West
The connection between Balkan Bogomilism and French Catharism is one of the most debated topics in medieval heresy studies. The evidence is real but complicated.
The clearest link is a council. In 1167, a gathering was held at Saint-Felix-de-Caraman (now Saint-Felix-Lauragais), near Toulouse. It was chaired by a man named Nicetas, identified as a Bogomil bishop from Constantinople. Nicetas belonged to the radical wing of Bogomilism, the Church of Dragovitsa, which practiced absolute dualism: two co-eternal cosmic principles, good and evil, neither one created by the other. At the council, he renewed the spiritual ordinations of six Cathar bishops, organized their dioceses, and instructed them that each bishopric should be independent, like the Seven Churches of Asia described in Revelation.
This is a documented case of a Bogomil leader personally organizing Western heretical communities. The Cathar consolamentum, their central rite of spiritual baptism through laying on of hands, was functionally identical to the Bogomil practice. Both movements had a two-tier community of ascetic “perfect” and ordinary believers. Both rejected material sacraments, icons, church buildings, and oaths. Both considered the material world the work of an evil power.
The texts traveled too. Around 1190, a Cathar bishop named Nazarius brought the Interrogatio Iohannis from Bulgaria to his community at Concorezzo in northern Italy. From there it reached Provence. This is how a Bogomil creation myth from tenth-century Bulgaria ended up in the archives of the French Inquisition at Carcassonne.
The Council of Saint-Felix itself is not without controversy. The document survives only through a 1660 printed edition by the lawyer Guillaume Besse, who claimed to have copied a 1223 manuscript. Some scholars have questioned its authenticity. But Nicetas’s existence and his mission to the West are independently confirmed by Italian sources, and the shared practices between Bogomils and Cathars are too numerous and too specific to be coincidence.
And then there is the word “bugger.”
The Latin Bulgarus, meaning simply “a Bulgarian,” became the Old French bougre, meaning “heretic.” Because medieval Catholic polemicists accused the Bogomils and Cathars of sexual deviance (a standard slander against heretics who rejected marriage and procreation), bougre acquired a sexual connotation. It entered English as “bugger” around 1340. A Dominican inquisitor named Robert, himself a former Cathar who converted and became one of the most feared persecutors of his former co-religionists, was known as Robert le Bougre: “Robert the Bulgarian.” In May 1239, at Mont-Aimé in Champagne, he burned 183 condemned Cathars in a single day. The pope eventually imprisoned him for his methods.
The word outlived them all. It is one of the few cases where a medieval heresy’s name entered everyday language, stripped of its original meaning, carrying nothing but a vague sense of transgression.
Two Brothers, Two Dualisms
Not all Bogomils agreed with each other. By the eleventh century, the movement had split into two schools, and the split mirrored one of the oldest arguments in the history of religion.
The Church of Bulgaria taught moderate dualism. God is supreme. Satanael was his first son who rebelled. Evil had a beginning (the rebellion) and will have an end (the Second Coming). This is essentially a Christian heresy: one God, one fallen angel, an eventual restoration.
The Church of Dragovitsa, named after a village on the border of Thrace and Macedonia, taught absolute dualism. God and Satan are co-eternal. Neither created the other. Evil has always existed and always will. The material world is entirely and irredeemably the product of the evil principle. This is structurally closer to Manichaean theology.
It is also, strikingly, almost identical to Zurvanism, the heretical branch of Zoroastrianism in which the supreme god Zurvan gives birth to twin sons: Ohrmazd (good) and Ahriman (evil). The Bogomil trinitarian model (Father, rebellious elder son, faithful younger son) maps directly onto the Zurvanite model (Zurvan, Ahriman, Ohrmazd). Scholars including R.C. Zaehner and Mircea Eliade have noted this parallel. The researcher Ewa Weiling-Feldthusen, in her 2006 study “In Search of a Missing Link,” made the case explicit. The problem is the gap: no documented chain of transmission connects ancient Iranian religion and tenth-century Slavic heretics. The structural resemblance is unmistakable. Whether it represents inheritance, parallel invention, or some underground current we cannot trace is an open question.
The Orphic mysteries of ancient Greece taught their own version of the same idea: the body (soma) is a tomb (sema) for the divine soul, imprisoned in matter through primordial violence. In the Interrogatio Iohannis, the Bogomils taught that angelic souls were trapped in bodies of clay by Satanael. Whether this represents an independent tradition, a distant cousin, or a common ancestor of the dualist worldview is the kind of question that does not have a clean answer. The patterns exist. The transmission chains are uncertain. This is where honest scholarship stops and speculation begins.
The split within Bogomilism directly caused a parallel split in Western Catharism. The Church of Concorezzo near Milan followed the moderate Bulgarian lineage. The Church of Desenzano south of Lake Garda followed the absolute Dragovitsa lineage. The ex-heretic turned Dominican inquisitor Rainier Sacconi, writing around 1250, stated that “all the heretic churches of the West had their origin in Bulgaria and Drugunthia.”
The Tombstones That Weren’t Theirs
Scattered across Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and western Serbia, roughly 70,000 medieval tombstones called stećci stand in fields and on hillsides. They are carved with spirals, dancers, deer, swords, crescent moons, and figures raising their hands in gestures that no one can fully explain. For over a century, they were called “Bogomil tombstones.”
They almost certainly are not.
The attribution was the work of the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (the same man who later excavated Knossos) in the late nineteenth century. It was then promoted by Beni Kallay, who became the Austro-Hungarian administrator of Bosnia in 1882, and who saw political value in giving Bosnians a unique medieval religious identity separate from Serbian or Croatian claims. The “Bogomil tombstone” theory gave Bosnians something distinctly their own.
The evidence does not support it. Around 6,000 stećci bear inscriptions, written in Cyrillic. They contain conventional Christian prayers and familial dedications. Not one endorses dualist doctrine, rejects the Old Testament, or mentions a two-powers cosmology. More importantly, the tombstones were used by all three medieval Christian communities in the region: Orthodox, Catholic, and the krstjani of the Bosnian Church. The art historian Marian Wenzel, who spent decades studying them, concluded they represent a shared regional funerary tradition, not the markers of a specific sect.
In 2016, UNESCO inscribed 28 stećci necropolises across four countries as a World Heritage Site. The inscription describes them as a regional medieval tradition. The word “Bogomil” does not appear.
The stećci are remarkable on their own terms. The kolo dancers, the hunting scenes, the raised hands, the spirals that might be solar symbols or might be purely decorative: these are traces of a medieval Balkan world that left few other records of its inner life. They do not need the Bogomil label to be interesting.
What Remains
Bogomilism as an organized movement fades from the record under Ottoman rule. There are no Bogomil churches to close when there were never any churches to begin with. The communities dissolved, merged into local Christian practice, or, in some cases, converted to Islam over the following century. But the popular theory that Bosnian Muslims are specifically descended from converted Bogomils is now largely rejected by scholars. The Bosnian Church had already been destroyed by Catholic pressure in 1459, four years before the Ottoman conquest. Islamization in Bosnia was gradual, driven by economic incentives and social mobility rather than theological affinity, and took over a century to produce a Muslim majority.
Modern Balkan nationalism has tried to claim the Bogomils for various causes. Bulgaria emphasizes the movement’s Bulgarian origins. North Macedonia points to the cluster of Bogomil toponyms in its territory (the river Babuna, the mountain Babuna, the Bogomila waterfall, the village Bogomila). Bosniak intellectuals have used the Bogomil narrative to ground a pre-Ottoman indigenous identity. Each claim contains some truth. None contains all of it.
What Bogomilism left behind is less a lineage than an echo. The insistence that the visible world is broken. The suspicion that institutions serve themselves. The idea that a genuine spiritual life can happen in a room with no altar, no priest, and no cross. These ideas reappeared in Cathar Languedoc, in Reformation-era dissent, and in every movement that has tried to strip Christianity back to its core texts and a clean conscience.
The record is partial. Almost everything we know comes from people who hated them. Cosmas was an enemy. Anna Komnene was an emperor’s daughter justifying her father’s violence. The Inquisition preserved the Interrogatio Iohannis as evidence, not as scripture. We are reading the Bogomils through the eyes of their persecutors, and we should remember that.
But even through that distortion, the outline is clear. For five centuries, across the Balkans and into western Europe, ordinary people gathered in rooms to pray, to fast, and to imagine a world where the two powers, light and dark, were still at war, and where the right side could win if you lived simply enough and believed purely enough. They left almost nothing behind. Their enemies left everything.
By the Author
Serbian Folk Tales by Đorđe Kojanović Stefanović, ed. Rade Kolbas Illustrated Serbian Fairy Tales Vol. 1 by Rade Kolbas Folk Tales (Stojanović) by Mijat Stojanović, trans. Rade Kolbas
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Cosmas the Priest, Sermon Against the Heretics (Беседа против богомилите), Bulgaria, c. 970
- Interrogatio Iohannis (Book of the Secret Supper), surviving in Vienna (Austrian National Library, 12th-13th c.) and Carcassonne (Inquisition archives, 14th c.) manuscripts
- Euthymios Zigabenos, Panoplia Dogmatike, early 12th century
- Anna Komnene, Alexiad, c. 1148 (account of Basil the Physician and Alexios I Komnenos)
- Synodikon of Tsar Boril, Tarnovo, 11 February 1211 (Sts. Cyril and Methodius National Library, Sofia; UNESCO Memory of the World, 2017)
- Stefan the First-Crowned, Life of Saint Simeon (biography of Stefan Nemanja), early 13th century
- Rainier Sacconi, Summa de Catharis et Pauperibus de Lugduno, c. 1250
- Acts of the Council of Saint-Felix-de-Caraman (1167), preserved in Guillaume Besse’s 1660 printed edition
- Dimitri Obolensky, The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism (Cambridge University Press, 1948)
- Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge University Press, 1947)
- Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (Yale University Press, 2000)
- Dragoljub Dragojlović, Богомилство на Балкану и у Малој Азији (Bogomilism in the Balkans and Asia Minor), SANU, Belgrade, 1974-1982
- John V. A. Fine, The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation (East European Quarterly / Columbia University Press, 1975)
- Edina Bozóky, Le livre secret des Cathares: Interrogatio Iohannis (Beauchesne, Paris, 1980)
- R. C. Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma (Oxford University Press, 1955)
- Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 3 (University of Chicago Press, 1985)
- Ewa Weiling-Feldthusen, ‘In Search of a Missing Link: Bogomilism and Zurvanism’ (2006)
- Sir Arthur Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot (Longmans, Green, 1876)
- Marian Wenzel, Ukrasni motivi na stećcima / Ornamental Motifs on Tombstones from Medieval Bosnia and Surrounding Regions (Veselin Masleša, Sarajevo, 1965)
- UNESCO World Heritage inscription: Stećci Medieval Tombstones Graveyards (28 necropolises across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia), 2016
