The Bogomiles—that strange Manichæan sect whose history has already been touched on, and who appear to have formed the majority of the Bosnian population during the very centuries in which these monuments were erected—shrank with horror from representations of the cross. ‘They abhor the cross as the instrument of Christ’s death,’ says Euthymius,[193] who, from having been commissioned by the Emperor to extract the full tenets of the sect out of its ‘heresiarch’ Basil, is peculiarly qualified to speak on the matter. When pressed by Euthymius as to the reason why the Bogomiles, when vexed with devils, ran to the cross and cried out to it, he made answer that the evil spirits within them loved the cross, for it was their own handiwork. It appeased them, therefore, or enticed them forth. Is not, then, the absence of the cross on these monuments, coupled with the fact of its presence on all undoubtedly _orthodox_ sepulchres throughout these regions, and some of these of considerable antiquity, strong presumptive evidence that they are the work of those old Bosnian puritans? This reasoning will perhaps appear the more significant when it is added that the modern Bosniacs refer these hoary sepulchres to the Bogomiles. Thus the voice of tradition, the remarkable conformity of these tombs with a salient peculiarity of the Bogomilian religion, the approximate date of their erection—all point to the same conclusion. Add to these the locality of so many of these ancient graveyards. During the course of our journey through Bosnia we came upon many spots where these interesting monuments existed. They were generally away from towns—in mountain gorges, by unfrequented paths—in the Wilderness, in short, where the Bogomiles took refuge from their Romish oppressors. The secluded position of these tombs recalls the words of Raphael of Volaterra, who speaks of the Manichæan brotherhoods as living in hidden valleys among the mountains of Bosnia.[194] It has already been noticed that the peculiar situation of these sectaries, perhaps too their iconoclastic tenets, made them ready to welcome Mahometan in place of Romish rulers, and favoured that process of renegation which has given us a Sclavonic race of believers in the Prophet. May not this account for the preservation of so many of these monuments, when nearly every other præ-Turkish memorial of Bosnia has been swept away? Is it not conceivable that these renegade Manichees may still have looked with peculiar tenderness on the tombs of their fathers, and have averted the hand of the destroyer? Alas! neither heretic nor infidel has a _vates sacer_ to enlighten us on these sepulchral mysteries; but we at least found it pleasing to believe that the rudely hewn blocks, that we came upon amid primeval forest or solitary mountain glen, were, as the Bosniacs assert, ‘the tombs of the Bogomiles’—the sole material memorials of those staunch upholders of Puritan faith in the days of grosser superstition, whose