At the very moment when the Turks were threatening the existence of the Bosnian kingdom, the King, then Stephen Tomašević, and priests, aided by the magnates and aristocratic party in the State, were pushing the persecution of the Bogomiles to an extreme which perhaps it had never reached before. In the year 1459 King Stephen turned his feudal arms against the inoffensive Bogomiles at home, and hounded out as many, it is said,[71] as forty thousand, who took refuge in the Herzegovina, with their co-religionist, the Duke of St. Sava. Others he sent in chains to Rome, where it appears they were ‘benignantly converted’—whatever that means. But the expulsion of forty thousand did little to diminish the strength of the Bogomiles in Bosnia. In 1462, as we know from the Roman archives, heresy was as powerful as ever in Bosnia. Already, twelve years before,[72] the Bogomiles had invited the Turks into Bosnia as their deliverers; in 1463 the invitation was repeated, a successful negotiation was opened with the Sultan, and, on Mahomet II.’s invasion, the Catholic king found himself deserted by his people. The keys of the principal fortress, the royal city of Bobovac, were handed over to the Turk by the ‘Manichæan’ governor;[73] the other fortresses and towns hastened to imitate its example, and within a week ‘seventy cities defended by nature and art’ passed into the hands of Mahomet. Bosnia, which may be described as one vast stronghold, refused to strike a blow in defence of her priestly tyrants.