EPILOGUE 787
on the east and Muslim Spain on the west, and especially among the more
structured Manichaean gnostics, whose message of light survived with vigor.
Within a century after Mani's death, in about 276, the founder's religion
spread throughout the Roman Empire and Asia and was the sturdiest of the
gnostic sects. Even after the earlier dismal suppression of other gnostic schools
in North Africa and most of Europe, areas of ascetic neomanichaeans survived
largely beyond the grasp of pope and emperor or at the outer reaches of their
dominion, from Turkestan to Carthage—in Persia, in the Arabic Near East,
in western China, and in southern France, where persecution was initially less
extreme. These were also the Islamic gnostics in central Asia. And there was
the amazing trail of the neomanichaean Paulicians, who from the sixth to the
tenth centuries were in Armenia and the eastern provinces of the Byzantine
Empire and who later merged with the neomanichaean Bogomils, who were
driven out of Constantinople and persisted in Syria and Armenia; it was
Bogomil missionaries who in the eleventh century brought their form of
Manichaeism to the Cathars in France. The Manichaeans in Chinese Turfan
became the leaders of the state religion of the important Uigur empire in
Turkestan, western China (762-840). In its territorial range, in its cultural
multiplicity, no religion has been so internationally receptive as has gnosti-
cism. Into its diversity of sects and scriptures it incorporated essential figures
from the world's major philosophies and religions: Buddha, Plato, Ahura Mazda,
Apollo, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.
The thirteenth century was tragic for the gnostic speculation, both in the
Far and Middle East and in the European West. In Asia it was Genghis Khan's
horsemen who from 1218 to 1224 stormed over the gnostics in Chinese
Turkestan; in Provence it was Pope Innocent Ill's Albigensian crusade (1209)
into southern France that cleansed the "Manichaean scourge of god" from the
earth. The crusade was followed by a century of the newly formed Inquisition
(1231). After another century of murder, torture, seizure of properties, and
forced conversion, by the end of the fourteenth century the Cathars (or Albi-
gensians), who flourished in the Occitan region in southwest France, were
wiped out, their meditation extinct. Only small numbers of Cathar gnostics
survive today, making up the Cathar church in parts of France and Canada.
They have their own website. There are more Mandaeans (also known as Na-
soreans and Christians of Saint John), a largely non-Christian sect that looks
back to Babylonia for its astrology and to John the baptizer for his cleanliness
rite of immersion. The holy book of the Mandaeans, which means "knowers"