Seventh-to-ninth-century dualist Christian sect of Armenia and the eastern Byzantine Empire. The name Paulicians (Greek Pauliciani) is derived either from the apostle Paul (whom they particularly revered, treating his epistles as authoritative scripture while rejecting much of the OT) or from Paul of Samosata (the third-century adoptionist whom some early Byzantine sources identified as their founder; the etymology is contested in modern scholarship). The movement is traditionally traced to Constantine of Mananali (mid-seventh century), who founded the sect in Armenia substantially under the influence of earlier Marcionite and Manichaean ideas. The Paulicians spread substantially across Armenia, Asia Minor, and Thrace through the late seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries; were intermittently tolerated and intermittently persecuted by Byzantine emperors; were forcibly transplanted in large numbers to Thrace under Emperor John Tzimiskes (970) and Emperor Constantine VII (mid-tenth century), where they substantially contributed to the formation of the later Bogomil movement. The Paulicians' principal distinctives included: (1) dualist cosmology (two principles; the evil principle as creator of the material world and identified with the OT God; the good principle as the spiritual God of the NT); (2) docetic Christology (Christ as adopted at baptism, not as eternal Son in real material incarnation); (3) rejection of OT; (4) rejection of orthodox sacraments and church hierarchy; (5) special veneration of Paul; (6) rejection of icons and physical aids to worship. The patriarchal-Reformed reader engages the Paulicians as the substantive eastern-medieval ancestor of the Bogomil-Catharist dualist tradition that continued through to the medieval Western Albigenses.