Tenth-to-fourteenth-century Balkan dualist Christian sect. The name Bogomil means dear to God in Bulgarian and was the name of the traditional founder, a Bulgarian priest active in the mid-tenth century during the reign of Tsar Peter I of Bulgaria. The movement combined the standard dualist heretical package (continuous with the Paulicians, whose Thrace-transplanted communities under John Tzimiskes had contributed to the Bogomil movement's formation) with substantial Bulgarian-Slavic cultural elements and substantial social-revolutionary dimensions (the Bogomils were substantially anti-clerical and anti-feudal in their social orientation, attracting peasant followers against the established Byzantine and Bulgarian hierarchies). The principal Bogomil distinctives included: (1) dualist cosmology (two principles; the visible material world as the creation of an evil principle, often identified with Satanael the older son of God, who rebelled and created matter; the spiritual world as the creation of the good Father); (2) docetic Christology (Christ as a spiritual being who appeared in apparent material form but did not really take on material flesh); (3) rejection of OT (the Bogomils accepted only the Psalms and the prophets from the OT; rejected the Pentateuch as the work of the evil principle); (4) rejection of orthodox sacraments and clerical hierarchy; (5) strict asceticism for the elect, with renunciation of marriage, meat-eating, and property; (6) anti-feudal social orientation. The movement spread substantially across Bulgaria, Macedonia, Bosnia, and Serbia through the late tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries; substantially contributed to the formation of the Western Cathari / Albigenses through Bogomil-Catharist contact in the twelfth century (Bogomil missionaries traveled to Languedoc and northern Italy; substantial doctrinal and organizational continuity between the Eastern Bogomils and the Western Cathari is well-attested). The Bogomils were intermittently persecuted by Byzantine and Bulgarian authorities; the movement substantially declined after the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans (fourteenth-fifteenth centuries); the so-called Bosnian Church (the medieval Bosnian schismatic church, which contemporary Catholic and Orthodox sources accused of being substantially Bogomil) has been substantially debated in modern scholarship.