Paulicians

← Encyclopedia

The Paulicians took shape on the hard eastern edge of the Byzantine Empire, in the mountain country where Armenia met the uplands of Asia Minor and where the line between Constantinople and the Arab Caliphate was less a border than a contested march. They emerge in the sources from about the middle of the seventh century and survive as an organized, named community into the tenth. They called themselves simply Christians. The label “Paulician” was set on them from outside, and almost everything later written about them was written by people who wanted them gone — churchmen and imperial officials for whom the movement was a heresy to be argued down and a population to be moved, broken, or burned. A frontier people is therefore visible mainly in the reports of its adversaries, and that fact governs everything that can be said about it.

The source problem

The central difficulty is not the absence of testimony but its bias. The fullest account is a ninth-century Greek treatise that travels under the name of Peter of Sicily, written to refute the sect and, on its own telling, to warn the Bulgarians against it; alongside it stand the related polemic associated with the patriarch Photius and a cluster of shorter Byzantine refutations. These are works of heresy-hunting in the high patristic manner — the genre cataloged under patristic heresiology — and they share that genre’s habits: they sort a living movement into the slots of older condemned schools, they reach by reflex for the most damaging available label, and they preserve a doctrine only in order to convict it. The Paulicians left no apologia, no liturgy, no chronicle in their own hand. What survives of their inner life has passed through the filing system of the men sent to suppress them, and the distinction between a Paulician belief and a heresiologist’s template is, in many places, no longer recoverable. The doctrinal architecture itself — the disputed dualism, the rejected sacraments, the contest over the name — is the proper subject of the companion entry on Paulicianism; what concerns the people who bore the name is their social, political, and military life on the frontier.

The name and the reported faith

Even the name is a contested artifact. The most economical reading, and the one most often favored, ties it to Paul the Apostle, whose letters the movement prized above the rest of scripture; their opponents preferred to derive it from Paul of Samosata, the third-century bishop condemned for denying Christ’s full divinity, so as to fix an old heresy onto a new target. The faith those opponents describe is a dualism: two governing powers, a good God whose kingdom is the world to come and an evil maker responsible for the visible, material cosmos. On that account the Paulicians swept away the whole material apparatus of the established Church — its sacraments, the veneration of the cross, the cult of the Virgin and the saints, the priesthood, the images, the church buildings — as the works of the lower power, and held to the gospel and the Pauline letters as the betrayed teaching.

How far this portrait is faithful is exactly what scholarship divides over, and the division is best stated plainly rather than resolved. One line takes the dualism at something like face value and reads the Paulicians as a late survival of the radical dualist current of late antiquity, traced back through Marcion of Sinope — who likewise set the alien good God against the maker of this world and exalted Paul — and behind him to the Gnostic schools and their distinctive gnosis. A competing line argues that the Byzantine writers imposed a borrowed Manichaean grid on what was at root an austere, scripture-centered reform — adoptionist in its Christology, docetic at most in its handling of the incarnation, and ferociously plain in its rejection of cult — and that the “two principles” of the polemic are as much the polemicist’s inheritance as the sect’s confession. The dualist picture, in short, is the contested part; the people are firmer ground than the doctrine.

Constantine the founder, and the pattern of persecution

The movement’s own memory placed its origin with a teacher named Constantine, a native of Mananali near Samosata, who is said to have received the scriptures and begun to preach in the years after the mid-seventh century. He took the name Silvanus, after one of the apostle Paul’s companions — the founders who followed him likewise adopted Pauline traveling-names, Titus, Timothy, Tychicus, binding the leadership to the apostle whose letters anchored the sect. He gathered communities in the eastern themes and was, by the hostile account, stoned to death on imperial order, the first in a long line of Paulician leaders killed by the state they refused.

Persecution is the through-line of the early history. Imperial policy toward the movement oscillated between active suppression and the blunter instrument of forced deportation, the standard Byzantine technique for a troublesome frontier population: uproot it, march it across the empire, and resettle it where its energies could be turned to use or simply diluted. Successive emperors pursued the sect with varying ferocity; the harshest campaigns, in the first half of the ninth century, drove the Paulicians out of the empire’s protection altogether and into the arms of its enemies. That radicalization — a persecuted religious community converting itself into an armed polity on hostile ground — is the hinge on which the whole later history turns. The asceticism the sources ascribe to them, a discipline of renunciation common to the rigorist movements of the age and treated under asceticism, did not soften into quietism; under pressure it hardened into a war footing.

The state at Tephrike

By the middle of the ninth century the Paulicians who had fled imperial persecution had built, in the borderlands beyond the empire’s reach, a militarized state of their own. Its leaders were soldiers as much as elders. Under Karbeas, a Paulician officer who had defected from Byzantine service after the execution of his father, and then under his successor and kinsman Chrysocheir, the sect fortified the stronghold of Tephrike and a string of frontier posts, made common cause with the Arab emirates along the same frontier, and raided deep into Byzantine Anatolia — reaching, at the height of their reach, the great cities of the interior and the Aegean coast. For a generation the Paulician state was a genuine strategic problem for Constantinople: not a band of dissenters but a confessional principality with cavalry, allies, and a grievance.

The reckoning came under the emperor Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty. After Chrysocheir rebuffed his overtures — by the Byzantine account demanding the emperor withdraw from all of Asia — Basil moved against the Paulician strongholds in a series of campaigns culminating in the early 870s. Chrysocheir was killed; Tephrike fell and its fortifications were thrown down; the armed power of the sect was broken. What had been, for a few decades, a frontier nation reverted to a scattered and suspect minority. The military Paulicians of Tephrike are the most concrete thing the record preserves about the movement — a polity with a capital, a foreign policy, and a date of destruction — and they are concrete precisely because Byzantine military historians, unlike its heresiologists, had no doctrinal stake in describing them.

Resettlement in the Balkans

Deportation, which had begun as a tool of persecution, became after Tephrike the instrument of a longer afterlife. Both the earlier forced migrations and the dispersal of the survivors carried Paulician communities westward across the empire and, decisively, into Thrace and the Balkan frontier, where the Byzantine state planted them around Philippopolis to garrison its exposed northern border against the Bulgars and the Slavs. The logic was administrative rather than tolerant: a hardy, cohesive, militarily useful population was moved from a frontier where it was dangerous to one where it might be made useful. The effect was to seed a heterodox dualist community in the heart of the Balkans precisely at the moment when that region was becoming the next great theater of religious dissent.

The disputed transmission

This is why the Paulicians matter to a story larger than their own. From the tenth century a new dualist movement, the Bogomils, named for a Bulgarian priest and treated under Bogomilism, spread through Bulgaria and into the Byzantine and wider Balkan world; and many historians have held that the transplanted Paulicians of Thrace were among its formative influences, an austere dualist presence already in place when Bogomilism arose. A further and more contested line carries the current westward again, holding that Bogomil missionaries and texts helped shape the Catharism of the Rhineland, Lombardy, and Languedoc in the eleventh and twelfth centuries — so that a single dualist tradition is imagined running from late antiquity through Armenia and the Balkans to the inquisitorial fires of the medieval West.

The chain is widely drawn and genuinely suggestive, and at each link it is also an inference rather than a documented descent. The communities are real and their sequence in time and space is real; what is reconstructed, and disputed, is the line of transmission between them — drawn largely by the same hostile heresiological sources that supplied the dualist portrait in the first place, and inheriting all of that genre’s tendency to assimilate every austere dissent to one ancestral Manichaean error. Whether the Paulician–Bogomil–Cathar succession marks a real handing-on of a doctrine or a recurring family resemblance among movements that kept reinventing the same protest against a worldly Church is the hinge of a debate that has run through the study of medieval heresy since the nineteenth century — the maximalists arguing for a real doctrine handed on, the source-critics for a resemblance manufactured by the heresiologists out of a single inherited template.

Sources and scholarship

The Greek sources stand at the head of any study and shape its limits. The fullest is the treatise ascribed to Peter of Sicily, edited with a facing Latin translation in the great nineteenth-century corpus of Greek Christian texts, J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, volume 104, where it appears together with the related Byzantine refutations; the parallel polemic under the name of Photius occupies volume 102 of the same series. Both are in the public domain and freely consulted. A persistent strand of scholarship has tried to read past the polemic to the sect’s own voice: F. C. Conybeare’s The Key of Truth: A Manual of the Paulician Church of Armenia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898) edited and translated a late Armenian manuscript he took to preserve a Paulician — or Tondrakian — rite, an identification later scholars have largely dated much later than Conybeare wished while granting that the text belongs to a Paulician-descended Armenian milieu.

The modern critical foundation is Nina G. Garsoïan’s The Paulician Heresy: A Study of the Origin and Development of Paulicianism in Armenia and the Eastern Provinces of the Byzantine Empire (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), which set the movement firmly in its Armenian context and argued — against the reflexive “neo-Manichaean” label — that the Byzantine polemic systematically distorted what may have been a far more austere and indigenous reform; the Speculum review registers its impact. Steven Runciman’s earlier The Medieval Manichee (Cambridge, 1947) gave the maximalist transmission thesis its most influential English statement, tracing an unbroken dualist line from antiquity to the Cathars while himself conceding that Christian dualism and Mani’s religion were distinct things. The collaborative sourcebook by Janet and Bernard Hamilton, Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650–c. 1450 (Manchester University Press, 1998), gathers the Greek and Slavonic testimonies in translation and is the standard English gateway to the documents. Recent work continues to press the source-critical question — for instance the study of Sergius the Paulician in Peter of Sicily’s account in Studia Ceranea, and Cartledge and Griffin’s reassessment of the “heretical” Paulician and Tondrakian movements in the CERAE journal — and the weight of it falls increasingly on how much of the dualist Paulician was the Byzantine writer’s own construction.

A frontier community, fortified and broken and marched across an empire, survives in the documentary record as a problem its enemies set down in order to win an argument and hold a border. Stripped of the church it would not join and the doctrine its accusers fixed on it, what remains beyond dispute is the shape of the thing: a self-named Christian people of the Armenian march who became, for the medieval West casting about for the pedigree of its own dualist heresies, one of the standing answers to the question of where such a faith could have come from.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Gnosis · Sadducees · Religion · Middle Ages · Paulicianism · Byzantine Empire · Thrace · Bogomilism · Catharism · Dualism · Gnosticism · Paul The Apostle · Patristic Heresiology · Heresy · Asceticism · Docetism