Unfortunately this dark page in the history of Southern Slavdom followed directly upon one of the most brilliant periods in the intellectual development of Southern Slav culture. It was a period when the national culture of the Southern Slavs put forth some of its most vigorous, fairest and sanest blossoms—the time of the Bogumili (“beloved of God”) whose work of enlightenment spread from Bulgaria over the whole of the Slav South. The Bogumili were strongly opposed to the poetic glorification of the Crusades, because they grasped the fact that the extolling of such an ideal can never open the mind to _heretic_ culture—the culture based on _free choice according to conscience_—which was eventually to undermine the foundations of the sacrosanct Roman Empire and lay the first solid foundations of _true_ culture. The Bogumili taught that true culture is not spread by crusades, but springs from Christian, human contemplation. They deprecated personal worship, and replaced it by a worship of ideals, of spirit, and of thought. Wyclif, Huss and Luther are always quoted as the foremost apostles of the _heretical_ culture. But in the Hungarian Crusaders the Bogumili found bitter enemies. Bogumilist activity in Bosnia and Croatia was stifled in blood, and the people, who were beginning to protest against the lying cult of Cæsarism wedded to Papistry, were simply butchered in the name of the Cross. The blood-baths on the fields of Bosnia filled the people with consternation, but could not stifle Bogumilism. True, its progress was checked in the Southern Slav region, but it secretly penetrated westward, whence the Patarenes in Italy and the Catharists, Albigenses and Waldenses in France spread it all over the world. It is interesting to note that at the very moment when Bogumilist culture was destroyed among the Slavs themselves, they bequeathed this very Bogumilism to the rest of Europe—the first and only gift from the Southern Slav race _as a whole_ to the spiritual life of Europe. It was the true “antemurale Christianitatis”—the outworks of Christianity—purified from Byzantine and Roman elements. _What they gave_ was perhaps not so very much their own as the _vigour_ with which they transplanted the ideal and the doctrine of a spiritual life, from the mountains of Asia Minor to the West. Theirs was the work of emissaries and outposts.