The Paulicians were a dualist Christian movement on the Byzantine eastern frontier whom the imperial church treated as heretics. Persecution under the empress Theodora in the 840s drove survivors into Arab-held territory, where they built an armed principality at Tephrike that raided deep into Anatolia until Basil I destroyed it in 872. Alongside repression the empire used transplantation: Paulician communities were moved to Thrace, in the eighth century under Constantine V and most substantially in the 970s under John Tzimiskes, who settled them near Philippopolis as a military frontier population, where their descendants remained for centuries. The chronicle figure of about 100,000 killed under Theodora is a hostile estimate with no evidentiary support; Carl Dixon's recent study of the movement treats the Byzantine accounts as polemical constructions that need to be read against their purpose. What is well established is that the imperial state combined killing, confiscation and forced resettlement against a religious minority over more than a century.
Byzantine emperors suppressed the Paulician communities of eastern Anatolia by persecution and campaign, destroyed their state at Tephrike in 872, and transplanted surviving Paulicians to Thrace as frontier settlers
No defensible denominator exists. Byzantine sources give no count of the Paulician communities of eastern Anatolia, and the chronicle figure of 100,000 killed under the empress Theodora is a literary topos rather than an enumeration; the Paulician state at Tephrike is known only from narrative sources and its subject population cannot be reconstructed.
The upper bound is the figure given in the Byzantine chronicle tradition for those killed in the persecution under Theodora in the 840s. It is a hostile, unverified estimate of a kind these chronicles produce routinely; no lower bound can be established, and modern specialists including Carl Dixon treat the number as rhetorical.
Byzantine chronicles and the imperial anti-heretical legislation document the suppression of Paulician worship and communities; the killing figures they attach are not treated as reliable.
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