XI

THE PURITY OF THE MOUNTAINS

They denounce wealth, they have a horror of the Tsar, they ridicule their
superiors, condemn the nobles and forbid all slaves to obey their masters.
OOSMAS THE PRIEST
Against the Bogomils

In the mountains and forests of Bosnia and on the plateaux of Herzegovina-and

sometimes last in the wilderness-are thousands of sculptured tombs and dozens
of necropoli that have posed an enigma to history and archaeology for the past
two centuries. Their number, their arrangement, their sculptures, the
inscriptions on certain of them attest to the existence of important communities
with a hierarchy and precise customs, whose history is still very largely
unknown. The regions where they predominate indicate that they were peasant
communities, grouped around several fiefs, at the heart of secluded areas which
long escaped the jurisdiction of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches of Serbia.
The mystery appeared to be solved when these curious constructions were
attributed to the Bogomil heretics. The Bogomils, whose name means the Loved
Ones or the Friends of God, were a Gnostic-like sect, the heirs to neo-Manichean
traditions which emerged in Bulgaria from the ninth century onward. The sect
split into several groups, one of which took root in Bosnia and in Herzegovina, in
the heart of present-day Yugoslavia, over a period of several centuries. These
villages, castle-fortresses, and whole provinces acquired by the Bogomils are a
far cry from the miniscule Alexandrian groups. Gnosticism enters history,
implants itself in the bosom of national communities, founds its own churches
with priests and deacons and becomes a veritable temporal power in itself. By
the time of the Paulicians, another Gnostic sect contemporary with the
Messalians, Gnosticism had already ceased to be a clandestine doctrine taught
in secret or in the solitude of the desert; as a hotbed of revolt against all the
temporal powers, Gnosticism inevitably found itself confronted with the
movement of history, and the repressive measures to which it was subjected
compelled it to forge a social and political body, an autonomy, a destiny all its
own. Wherever it sets foot, wherever the word is spread, it creates pockets of
rebellion-religious or political-against the official Church and the secular
authority which is its expression. One therefore finds the new Gnostics rising up
by turns against Byzantium, the Slav invaders of the Balkans, the Orthodox