Paulicians

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The Paulicians were a Christian movement that arose on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire — in Armenia and the uplands of Asia Minor — from about the seventh century, and survived as an organized community into the tenth. Almost everything recorded about them was written by their opponents, churchmen and officials who counted them heretics, so the movement is known chiefly through the descriptions of those bent on suppressing it.

Those hostile sources, above all a ninth-century treatise attached to the name of Peter of Sicily, present the Paulicians as dualists: holders of the belief that two powers govern reality, a good God of the world to come and an evil maker of the visible, material world. On this account they rejected the material apparatus of the established Church — its sacraments, its veneration of the cross, its cult of the Virgin and the saints, its priesthood and images — and read the gospel and the letters of Paul, from whom their name was most likely drawn, as the true teaching betrayed by that Church. How far this portrait is accurate remains contested. Some scholars take the dualism at face value and trace it back through Marcion to the Gnostic currents of late antiquity; others argue that the heresiologists imposed a borrowed Manichaean template on what was, at root, an austere and adoptionist reform movement, and that the sect’s own voice has largely been lost beneath the polemic.

The history outside the doctrine is firmer. The movement is associated with a founding teacher remembered as Constantine, who took the name Silvanus, and it spread despite repeated imperial persecution and forced deportation. In the ninth century the Paulicians built a militarized state around the stronghold of Tephrike, raiding deep into Byzantine territory under the leaders Karbeas and Chrysocheir, until the emperor Basil I broke their power in the 870s. Survivors and earlier deportees were resettled in Thrace, in the Balkans, where the Byzantine state had moved them to guard its northern frontier.

That resettlement is the reason the Paulicians matter to a longer story. Many historians hold that their presence in the Balkans helped shape the Bogomils, the dualist movement that emerged in Bulgaria in the tenth century, and that the Bogomils in turn carried a related dualism westward to the Cathars of medieval Languedoc and Italy. The chain is widely drawn and genuinely suggestive; it is also, at each link, a matter of inference rather than documented transmission, and the degree of real continuity is debated. What can be said plainly is that a frontier community, known mostly through the words of those who destroyed it, became one of the recurring reference points by which the medieval West tried to explain where its dualist heresies had come from.

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