ABSTRACT
According to historians of the Paulicians,1 at the beginning of the ninth century a certain Sergios took over the leadership of the Paulician movement. During his thirty-year leadership the dissemination of the Paulician heresy within the Byzantine empire reached its height, and from this point until the year 878, when the Byzantine Emperor Basil I finally inflicted a crushing defeat on them and took their last stronghold, Tephrike, the Paulicians were persecuted by the Byzantines. But who were the Paulicians and why did the government in Constantinople (and imperial apologists) isolate and persecute them? In the first part of this chapter I shall focus on the way the Paulicians presented themselves, and in the second part I will attempt to elucidate the background to the extremely severe reaction against them. Though for simplicity's sake I will sometimes set 'Paulicians' against 'Byzantines' it is worth reiterating that the Paulicians saw themselves as Byzantines: segregation of the group as a distinct heretical sect is a Constantinopolitan construct.
