Peter Valdez, a rich merchant of Lyons, gave up all his property, and began about 1177 to wander about the country preaching repentance and the imitation of the Apostles. He procured the translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue, and soon began to gather followers. After a few years of toleration he was excommunicated in 1184 by Pope Lucius III. Thus cut off from the orthodox, Peter joined the Petrobrusians and became more frankly heretical. Before his death in 1197, his followers were to be found in Bohemia, in Lorraine, in southern France, in Aragon, and in northern Italy. These ‘Poor Men of Lyons,’ as they were called, rejected all priestly ministration, and included in one sweeping denunciation prayer for the dead, six of the seven sacraments, military service, and property. But grave differences soon broke them up into hostile sects. The Lombards sought to organise themselves separately from the Church, while the French were content to remain a school within the Church. The wise policy of later Popes allowed the more moderate to combine their own way of thinking with acceptance of the Church’s authority, and they remained for the most part humble-minded quietists, whose highest aspiration was to live in peace. Other sects assumed a more dangerous complexion than the Poor Men of Lyons. From the eleventh century onwards, obscure bodies of heretics appear under the names of Manicheans, Paulicians, Cathari, Bulgarians, Patarini, and Publicani. Their strength was at first in the Rhineland, whence they infected the north of France. Finally they found a more sympathetic field in southern France, where heresy had long flourished in various forms. The origin of these sects is obscure. [Sidenote: The Manichean sect.] The ancient opinion that they were direct descendants of the ancient Gnostics and Manichees cannot be upheld, and it is difficult even to prove their affiliation with the Paulicians and Bogomili of the Balkan peninsula, whose heresy had troubled the Eastern Empire in the days of the Macedonian and Comnenian dynasties. Their doctrines are as hard to define as their origin, and we have for the most part to rely upon the statements of their enemies. But it is clear that they represent neither a definite sect nor an organised body of heretical doctrine. Like the early Gnostics, they indicate a vague general tendency rather than any precise teaching, and differed widely among each other. The more thoroughgoing of them were dualists like the Manichees, believing that there existed two equal and co-eternal deities, the one evil and the other good. The rest seem to have held the modified dualism of the Bogomili, admitting the good principle to be the only God, and the author of the New Testament, and regarding the evil principle as a fallen spirit, the creator of the world, the source of the Old Testament revelation, essentially the Demiurgus of the Gnostics. The practical teaching of these heretics was as various as their doctrine.