The Bogomils
Tarnovo was the venue for a famous synod of the Bulgarian Church in 1211, which tried (unsuccessfully) to curb the growth of a notorious medieval heresy that plagued the Second Kingdom - Bogomilism . The movement is thought to have emerged from the teachings of a tenth-century priest named Bogomil (literally "beloved of God"), who inherited the concept of dualism from the earlier Manichaean and Paulician heresies. This held that the entire material world was the creation of the devil, and only the human soul was the province of God. Jesus was sent to earth to defeat Satan's reign on earth, but his mission failed; the fight with Satan's power therefore continued to be a daily war of attrition for all believers. The growth of the Bogomils coincided with the fall of the First Bulgarian Kingdom to the Byzantines, and the movement was strongly critical of the Bulgarian establishment, especially the clergy. Left-wing historians have been quick to emphasize Bogomilism's social impact, especially its appeal to the poor. Our only real knowledge of the Bogomils, however, comes from the movement's enemies - critics like the monk Cosmas, who described them as "lamblike and gentle, and pale from hypocritical fasting", but really "ravening wolves" who "sowed the tares of their preaching" among "simple and uneducated men". Cosmas was not the only person worried by the spread of the heresy throughout the Balkan peninsula. Byzantine chronicler Anna Comnena relates how her father Emperor Alexius I had the Bogomil leader Basil publicly burned in the Constantinople hippodrome somewhere around 1100. Despite repeated efforts to stamp it out, Bogomilism remained a powerful force throughout the Balkans, although once-fashionable theories that Bogomilism became the state religion of fifteenth-century Bosnia are nowadays questioned. Byzantine propaganda accused the Bogomils of all manner of unnatural practices, most common among which was sodomy - the adoption of the word "bugger" by the English language derives from confusion over the terms "Bogomil" and "Bulgar"
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