Europe: A History (67 page)
In this hall, attended by two eunuchs, I was brought before the emperor. At my entrance, the lions roared and the birds sang … But after prostrating myself for the third time, when I raised my head, I beheld the emperor, whom I had seen at first seated slightly above me, elevated almost to the roof of the hall and clad in different garments. How this was managed, I do not know …’
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Liutprand’s understandable sense of inferiority aptly reflects Western attitudes towards the East in this period.
Byzantium’s principal foe was Islam, against which it stood as Christendom’s front-line bastion. But on its Balkan flank it faced a vigorous state that was a major rival for more than two centuries. The first Bulgarian Empire emerged from the tribal adventures of Terbel, Krum, and Omartag (see p. 220) and exercised sway over much of Byzantium’s former Danubian provinces. Its adoption of Orthodox Christianity (see pp. 321–4) brought it into the world of Byzantine civilization, but did not prevent intense conflicts. Under Simeon (r. 893–927), who styled himself
‘Basileus kai Autokrator
of the Bulgars and Greeks’ as well as ‘Tsar’ (Caesar), Bulgaria sought to assume Byzantium’s role in the Balkans, but came to grief in 924 before the walls of Constantinople. In the tenth century Byzantine forces reconquered the eastern heartland of Bulgaria. In this they were helped by the strife surrounding the Bogumil heresy, and by their Magyar and Kievan mercenary allies. In 966–7 Svyatoslav of Kiev attacked and captured the ancient Bulgarian capital, Preslav, in return for 1,800 pounds of Byzantine gold.
Under Tsar Samuel (r. 976–1014) the Bulgarian empire knew a second lease of life. The new capital of Ochrid became the centre of a powerful monastic movement, and of an autocephalous Bulgarian Church that survived the Byzantine reconquest. The political end came in 1014, following the Byzantine victory at Serres in Macedonia. Basil II blinded 14,000 Bulgarian prisoners of war before
returning them to their Tsar, who promptly died of shame. Byzantium was still some way from the great crisis of 1071, when the Normans in Sicily, the Seljuks in Asia Minor, and the Pechenegs before the walls of Constantinople combined to provoke the onset of irreversible decline,
[BOGUMIL]
In the three centuries after Charlemagne the frontiers of Christendom were greatly extended. The countries converted were (in the order of their conversion) Moravia, Bulgaria, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and Kievan Rus’. In the north, the steady advance of the Saxon marches was accompanied by forcible christianization; but it was not until the eleventh century that any major advance was made into Scandinavia. Despite considerable friction on the ground, the leadership of the Greek and Latin Churches were still apt to view their missionary work as the common task of Christendom.
Moravia—whose name is related to the German
Mähren
, meaning march-lands—lay on the north bank of the Danube to the east of Charlemagne’s empire. It was the first of the Slav lands to emerge as an organized principality. In the seventh century, under one Samo, it is mentioned in Fredegar’s chronicle as a territory that had rejected the Frankish obedience. In the eighth century it was evangelized from Bavaria by (among others) the Irish missionary, Virgil of Salzburg. In the ninth century the reigning prince appears to have been baptized by a German bishop, and a church was consecrated at Nitra.
In 862, however, a Moravian approach to the Patriarch of Constantinople was answered by a mission led by two Macedonian brothers, Michael and Constantine, known respectively as SS Methodius (815–85) and Cyril (826–67). Methodius had been governor of one of the Byzantine empire’s Slav provinces; and Cyril, a diplomat, had travelled in the Muslim lands and in Khazaria. The purpose of their invitation to Moravia was apparently to check the oppressive influence of German priests, and to enable the country to worship in its own idiom. To this end Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet and a Slavonic liturgy, and translated the Bible.
After founding the Moravian mission, it is significant that the brothers travelled to Rome, where Cyril died. He was interred in the crypt of San Clemente. But Methodius returned to exercise his calling as Bishop of Pannonia and Moravia. He died in 885, probably at Velehrad near modern Bratislava. There was clearly much wrangling in Moravia between Latin and Greek clergy; yet Cyril and Methodius, the ‘Apostles of the Slavs’, enjoyed the patronage both of the Roman Pope and of the Byzantine Patriarch, thereby setting a rare, ecumenical example. Their names are revered by Czechs, Croats, and Serbs, and especially by the Bulgars, among whom the remnants of the mission eventually took refuge. Twenty years after the death of Methodius, Moravia was destroyed by the Magyars; but the memory of the ‘co-patrons of Europe’ has lingered on.
In Bulgaria, the rivalry of the Latin and the Greek Churches was ultimately resolved in favour of the Greeks. In the mid-ninth century the ruler of Bulgaria,
BOGUMIL
I
N
975 the Emperor John Tzimisces transplanted a community of Armenian heretics to the district of Philipopolis (Plovdiv) in Bulgarian Thrace. They were ‘Paulicians’, remnants of a much larger movement broken by the Byzantines some time earlier. At the same time, the Orthodox Church was showing concern about the followers of an obscure Bulgarian priest, Bogumil, whose errors suspiciously resembled those of the Paulicians. They too were dualists, heirs to a tradition that went back to the Gnostics and the (non-Christian) Manicheans. Merging together, the two groups were to found a faith whose adherents would stretch right across Europe ‘from Black Sea to Biscay’.
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Bogumilstvo
or ‘Bogumilism’ appealed to the downtrodden Slav peasants of the Balkans, resentful of Greek or Bulgar overlords. It was to develop in two forms, the main, ‘Bulgarian’ variety and the lesser, ‘Dragovitsan’ variety, so named after a village on the borders of Macedonia, where a thoroughgoing dualist doctrine of Paulician origin took root. It was brought to Constantinople by a monk called Basil the Bulgar, many of whose unrepentant followers were burned at the stake. But it resurfaced in the mid-twelfth century, when ‘false bishops’ had to be dismissed and a patriarch retired for Bogumil sympathies.
Bogumil doctrine diverged from Orthodox Christianity on issues derived from their views on the origin of evil. The Bogumils rejected the creation story of the Old Testament, believing that the world was created by Satan, God’s elder son. They also rejected Christ’s miracles, except as allegorical stories, the Sacraments, icons, feast days, and the entire liturgy and ritual of Orthodoxy. They specially detested the Cross since it was the instrument of Christ’s murder. According to one account, they believed that God had tempered his wrath by allowing Satan to keep what was already created, and that he sent Jesus, his second Son, to cure the resultant ills. Jesus, the embodiment of the Word, ‘entered the Virgin through her ear, took flesh there and emerged by the same door. The Virgin did not notice, but found Him as an infant in a Cave in Bethlehem. He lived and taught, and by seeming to die, was able to descend into Hell and bind Satan.’
2
Bogumil practices appeared very strange to contemporaries. Bogumils read only selected parts of the Bible, especially the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation. Their only prayer was ‘Our Father’, which they recited 120 times a day. They practised fasting, discouraged marriage, and trained an élite caste of ‘the Elect’. One branch, the followers of Cyril the Barefoot, practised nudism in an attempt to regain the Garden of Eden. Another, following the preacher Theodosius, indulged in orgies, deliberately experiencing sin in order to qualify for
repentance. In political matters, all Bogumils presented a front of passive but obdurate nonconformity.
Though Bogumilism was eradicated in Byzantium and Bulgaria during the thirteenth century, it had spread by then to the West (see pp. 361—3), and was taking root in fresh parts of the Balkans. In the fourteenth century it even penetrated the holy mountain of Athos. But its greatest success was to occur in the principalities of Bosnia and Hum (Hercegovina), whose rulers chose to propagate the Bogumil faith as an antidote to the pretensions of their Hungarian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox neighbours. It was in 1199 that the Ban of Bosnia and his court first declared themselves ‘Patarenes’, as the Bosnian Bogumils were called; and despite many twists of religious fortune, Bosnia remained predominantly Patarene until the Ottoman conquest of 1463. At this point the Bosnian nobility converted promptly to Islam, thereby avoiding the Catholic and Orthodox trap once again.
[SARAJEVO]
Scholars once believed that the Slavs were predisposed to Bogumilism through the dualist beliefs of Slav paganism. Hetmold of Lübeck reported in the twelfth century that the north German Slavs worshipped a good God and a bad God. If so, the phenomenon was purely local. Pagan Slavs were more likely to have been affected by Bogumilism than vice versa. The same can be said of Balkan folklore.
Dualists of the Bogumil type attracted many labels. Among them, apart from Bogumils, Dragovitsans, and Patarenes, were the
Phundaites
or ‘scrip-bearers’,
Babuni
(in Serbia),
Runcarii
or
Runkeler
(in Germany),
Kudugers
(in fifteenth-century Macedonia),
Poplicani
(in northern France), and
Bougres, Textores
or
Tisserands
or ‘weavers’,
Albigensians
, and
Cathars
in Languedoc.
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Bogumilism has been called ‘a hopeless faith’. If so, its adherents showed exceptional perseverance in place of hope.
Boris X (r. 852–88), was toying with a Frankish alliance; and in 862 he met with Louis the German at Tulln on the Danube. But the scheme misfired; and peace with Byzantium in 865 caused Boris to accept baptism from the Patriarch of Constantinople. Boris, however, continued to intrigue with Rome, and a long letter containing 106 questions on Roman practice and theology evoked the famous
Responsa
of Pope Nicholas II. A further Byzantine advance then led to the Bulgarian mission of St Clement Slovensky (840–916) and the final drive to bring Bulgaria into the Orthodox fold. Clement, a fellow Macedonian, had accompanied Cyril and Methodius to Moravia, and was Cyril’s principal continuator in his work on the Slavonic liturgy. He was probably the true systematizer both of the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language and of the Cyrillic alphabet. He was the
first bishop of the Bulgarian Church, and is buried in the monastery of St Pantaleinion at Ochrid. After 893, when pagan opposition to Christianity was crushed, the court of Tsar Simeon at Preslav hosted a veritable explosion of ecclesiastical learning for which Old Church Slavonic was now the vehicle. The auto-cephalous Bulgarian Church had seven sees: Ochrid, Pliska, Preska, Nesebar, Sardica (Sofia), Belgrade, and Preslav.
Bohemia, like Bulgaria, balanced for many years between Latin and Greek influences. In the ninth century the loyalties of the princes of Bohemia were pulled in two opposite directions—to the Franks and to the Moravians. Borivoj (r. 855–91) and his consort Ludmila, founders of the Hradéany chapel on the castle hill in Prague, were baptized into the Moravian (Slavonic) rite. Borivoj’s successor, Spytygner (r. 893–915), was baptized at Regensburg in Bavaria into the Latin rite. Vaclav (r. 900–29), better known as St Wenceslas, whose life and death are celebrated in equal measure in Latin and in Slavonic sources, reigned briefly at the height of the Magyar onslaught. He was murdered by his brother Boleslas I (r. 929–67), who was seeking a closer association with Saxony. In due course, as a martyr to growing German influence, he became the national saint of the Czechs. When the bishopric of Prague was founded in 967, it was subordinated to the metropolitan of Mainz, thereby reflecting the power of the new Ottonian empire. St Vojtech or Adalbert (956–97) was its second bishop.
Yet for more than a century, under the protection of the Přemyslid dynasty, the Slavonic rite survived in Bohemia alongside the Latin one. At the monastery of Sazanar in particular a rich school of Slavonic learning flourished, with contacts both in Kiev and in Croatia. In 1091, as an act of defiance, King Vratislav II submitted himself to a second Slavonic coronation by the last abbot of Sazanar. Thereafter, Latinization was virtually complete. Bohemia, a fief of the Empire and a client province of the German Church, was the Slav country most firmly drawn into the German orbit.
Poland, Bohemia’s eastern neighbour, edged toward Christendom in a similarly complex and prolonged process. In the ninth century, when the
Wiátanie
or ‘Vistulanian tribe’ owed allegiance to Moravia, the earliest Christian contacts were made with the mission of Cyril and Methodius. The chief of the Vistulanians appears to have accepted baptism in the Slavonic rite in 875; and traces of several Christian churches from that period have been discovered. The region of the upper Vistula, including Cracow, remained part of Bohemia until 990, and did not finally sever its connections with the Czech world until 1086. Poland’s early links with the Slavonic rite have not been emphasized; but it is arguable, as in Bohemia, that they persisted into the twelfth century.
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Most of the tribes to the north, who would form the core of the first Polish kingdom, followed a different course. They remained pagan to the middle of the tenth century, after which they were drawn directly into the sphere of the Latin Church. The fullest description of Slavdom in its final pagan days was composed by a Moorish Jew, Ibrahim-Ibn-Jakub, who was sent by the Caliph of Cordova on an embassy to central Europe c.965. He visited Prague and possibly Cracow:
The lands of the Slavs stretch from the Syrian Sea to the Ocean in the north… At present there are four kings: the king of the Bulgars; Bojeslav, King of Faraga, Boiema and Karako; Mesko, king of the north; and Nakon on the border of the West.
In general, the Slavs are violent and inclined to aggression. If not for the disharmony among them … no people could match their strength … They are specially energetic in agriculture … Their trade on land reaches to the Ruthenians and to Constantinople ….