In addition to what has been said, Bulgaria had the merit not only of preserving the achievements of Cyril and Methodius, which would otherwise have been doomed to failure, but also of creating all the necessary prerequisites for their further development and genuine flowering. The Bulgarians were the first among the Slav peoples to create a rich literature of their own, written in their own language, which was called upon to play a Pan-Slavic role and to serve as an intermediary between the highly-developed Byzantine culture and the southern and eastern Slavs.

The Old Bulgarian language served as the basis of literary Russian and Serbian languages, and was for several centuries the church and official state language of Russians and Romanians.

THE BOGOMILS – PREDECESSORS OF THE REFORMATION

The numerous wars waged by Simeon, however, and his ambitious building programme had drained the resources of the country and proved a burden which the people were unable to support. At the same time, the development of feudal relations had turned the majority of the Bulgarian peasants from independent landowners into cruelly exploited serfs. Discontent was seething among them. At the time when the Bulgarians were converted to Christianity, the Christian Church already had a biography which was five centuries old, which had led it away from the humane and democratic principles of Early Christianity and had turned it lastingly into a powerful ideological and political institution whose entire activity was aimed at preserving and consolidating the existing feudal social order. What is more, the Church itself was a big feudal landowner with definite administrative and juridical functions, and the supreme clergy was a component of the ruling feudal class. In such conditions and in view of the predominant religious world outlook among the people, the popular discontent inevitably acquired a religious form.

Thanks to the epoch-making work of Cyril and Methodius, there was a popular rural intelligentsia in Bulgaria of a scope inconceivable for the 'new' west- European states, where literary language and vernacular were divorced. The literate people, who had read religious books, were not slow in perceiving the gap separating the social order sanctioned by the church and the principles embodied in the Bible, so that many of them became ideologists of the people's discontent. Thus, in the 920s the Bogomil movement came into being, which was also known as 'the Bulgarian heresy' – one of the most powerful heretic movements of the early Middle Ages. It was religious in form and profoundly social in content: it was the movement of the dependent peasantry and urban poor against the feudal social system.

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