The events which now follow must have largely increased the number of Manichæans in these and the other Serbian lands. Basil, ‘the slayer of the Bulgarians,’ at the beginning of the eleventh century, finally overthrew the first Bulgarian Empire. Towards the end of the same century the Bulgarian heretics, now under Byzantine rule, were hunted down by the orthodox Emperor. The Princess Anna Comnena[19] has left us an account of the persecution of the Bogomiles by her father Alexius. The Byzantine princess unblushingly relates the trap which the Emperor condescended to set for the chief apostle of the sect, at that time a certain Basil; how he artfully led on the heresiarch by holding out hopes of conversion; how he invited him to the imperial table, and in his closet wormed out of him the secrets of his sect; and then, suddenly throwing aside the arras on the wall, revealed the scribe who had taken down the confession of his heresy, and beckoned to his apparitors to throw his victim into irons. The account which Anna Comnena gives of this sect is valuable in spite of its scurrility. The princess calls the Bogomiles ‘a mixture of Manichees and Massalians.’ She laughs at their uncombed hair, their low origin,[20] and their long faces, ‘which they hide to the nose, and walk bowed, attired like monks, muttering something between their lips.’ Basil himself was ‘a lanky man, with a sparse beard, tall and thin.’ From the account given of his confession we have intimations of a belief in the phantastic doctrine, and what was more shocking still, ‘He called the sacred churches—woe is me!—the sacred churches, fanes of demons!’ When he saw himself betrayed by the Emperor, he declared that he would be rescued from death by ‘angels and demons.’ Anna Comnena would like to say more of this cursed heresy, ‘but modesty keeps me from doing so, as beautiful Sappho says somewhere; for though I am an historian, I am also a woman, and the most honourable of the purple, and the first offshoot of Alexius.’ The ‘most honourable of the purple,’ however, feels no hesitation in describing the holocaust which her father made of all the Bogomiles he could catch, and more particularly the roasting of Basil. This delicately sensitive princess gloats over the preparations in the hippodrome, the crackling of the fire, the breaking out of poor human nature as the victim comes nearer to the scorching, the turning away of his eyes, and finally the quivering of his limbs. One asks, in amazement, whether any religion that has ever existed in the world has produced such monsters of humanity as Christianity calling itself orthodox!