The contest in the regions south of Hungary is instructive as an illustration of the unconquerable persistence of Rome in conducting for centuries an apparently resultless struggle, undeterred by defeat, taking advantage of every opening for a renewal of the strife, and using for its ends the ambition of monarchs and the self-sacrificing devotion of zealots. A condensed review of the rapid vicissitudes of such a contest is therefore not out of place, although the scene of action lay too far from the centres of European life to have decisive influence upon the development of European thought and belief, except as it served as a refuge for the persecuted and a centre of orthodoxy to which neophytes could be sent. The vast regions east of the Adriatic scarce paid more than a nominal spiritual allegiance to Rome. A savage and turbulent population, conquered by Hungary towards the end of the eleventh century, and always endeavoring to throw off the yoke, was Christian in little more than name. Such Christianity as it boasted, moreover, was not Latin. The national ritual was Slavic, in spite of its prohibition by Gregory VII., and the Roman observance was detested, from its foreign origin, as the badge of subjugation. The few Latin prelates and priests and monks were encamped amid a hostile population to whom they were strangers in language and manners, and the dissoluteness of their lives gave them no opportunity of acquiring a moral influence that might disarm national and race antipathies. Under such circumstances there was nothing to hinder the spread of Catharism, and when the devastating wars of the Hungarians came to be dignified as crusades for the extermination of heresy, heresy might well claim to be identified with patriotism. From the Danube to Macedonia, and from the Adriatic to the Euxine, the Catharan Church was well organized, divided into dioceses with their bishops, and actively engaged in mission work. Its most flourishing province was Bosnia, where, at the end of the twelfth century, it counted some ten thousand devoted partisans. Culin, the Ban who held it under the suzerainty of Hungary, was a Catharan, and so were his wife and the rest of his family. Even Catholic prelates were suspected, not without cause, of leaning secretly to the heretic belief.[324]