Bogomilism

Bogomilism arose in the First Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century, founded by the priest Bogomil, probably in Macedonia. It drew on the Paulicians. The Bogomils believed that God made the spiritual world and Satan, his fallen son, the material one, so that the body was the work of the devil; they sought purity through fasting and prayer.

They rejected the church hierarchy, the cross and monasticism, and honoured the Lord's Prayer as the strongest weapon against Satan. The movement helped to give rise to the Cathars of Western Europe.

Bulgaria, Serbia and Byzantium suppressed Bogomilism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but it lingered in Hum and Bosnia, where the Hungarians used the charge of heresy to justify crusades. Few traces survived the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463.