The crises of heresy in the eastern Roman Empire: a case study of the Bogomils from the tenth to eleventh centuries CE

Medieval Christianity witnessed a close co-operation between the State and various ecclesiastical institutions. Thus, the spread of heresies across the various principalities of Medieval Christendom was perceived as threatening multiple crises, social, theological, and political in nature. The rise of the heretical sect known as the Bogomils in the Byzantine Empire during the tenth to eleventh centuries and the attempts of imperial authorities to combat them present such an instance of the many types of crises that a heretical group was perceived to elicit in medieval Christian states. This article examines tenth and eleventh-century Bogomilism through the prism of crisis, stressing the different representations of its adherents by various Byzantine heresiological writers. Attention is paid to how Byzantine heresiologists deploy categories of crises coined much earlier, during the initial wave of heresiological material produced during Late Antiquity.