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While the Asmarids exported religious heterodoxy, among the Christian kingdoms, it lingered closer to home - and nowhere more closely than in the north of Iberia.
The Tellian movement, rooted in Tyrol, had been driven out decades prior through the efforts of the Church, with several key Tellian leaders executed as heretics and communities uprooted. Many of these Tellians took to the road as itinerant preachers, spreading across Europe and carrying the remnants of their ideology with them. There was no particular unity to these post-Tellian communities - they sprung up wherever they sprang up, with the ideas typically traveling along trade routes informally.
Tellian thought is likely to have been the source of several schismatic movements in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. In the 14th century, a community known as the Helpfridites could be found in rural areas around Breisgau, adhering to an ethos of sinlessness and ecclesiastical poverty clearly derived from the Tellians. German chronicles describe these faithful as "Tirolen" - "Tyroleans" - and suggest they were tolerated only grudgingly.
Also described as "Tyroleans" are a more prominent group in northern Iberia known as the Good Men of Melide, though they're more commonly known as the Anicetians, after their founder, Anizetto das Colinas - or Anicette, as he was known in French. Anizetto, a Hispanicized Norman, was active in the late 1200s, apparently adopting his view on Christianity independently. Accounts from surviving early Anicetian texts report that he settled in the town of Melide in Santiago, where he surrendered all his earthly belongings and lived the life of an impoverished preacher. Despite opposition from the Church, Anizetto became something of a local saint. By all accounts, the people of Melide came to believe he was the holiest man alive, and it's reported that he cured a child of the plague simply by touching him.
By the time of Anizetto's death, he had amassed a significant lay following among the poor and common classes, spreading to smaller towns in the area and even building small churches. More critically, however, some of his followers took to traveling along the Way of Saint James, offering their services as healers, map-sellers, guides or even providers of rest for pilgrims. This handful of people had access to an enormous flow of pilgrims through Santiago - pilgrims who would sometimes ask them about their faith.
The Church itself viewed Anizetto and his movement as a nuisance. In 1322, Anizetto himself was arrested and thrown in jail by the ecclesiastical authorities. He died in prison, but his movement long survived him. By the time of the War of Navarrese Succession, it was prevalent in the western Cantabrian Mountains and rural Gallaecia, and Tellian minorities lived in the poorer parts of cities like Santiago and Astorga, where they were generally treated as undesirables. They were most numerous in the city of Lugo, where they came to enjoy the quiet protection of the city's sympathetic rulers.
Anicetian doctrine is well-documented and shares clear commonalities with the Tellians, but also appears to draw inspiration from very orthodox forms of Islam - an interesting example of cultural cross-pollination in Iberia. The Anicetians believed that man was created from sin and has an evil nature, and that the Old Testament God was in fact the creator of sin. They took a dualistic view of God in which the Old Testament God was the "Evil God" and the New Testament God was his good counterpart. By the Anicetian telling, Jesus was the Son of God, but he was fully human, but achieved salvation through his sinlessness and purity of heart, a process through which he attained divinity - an essentially adoptionist viewpoint.
Purity and sinlessness were core to Anicetian life. They maintained an ethos of simplicity, cleanliness and austerity. In their view of the world, God punished men for their sins, and the only way to avoid punishment was to live a simple, pure and sinless life. Part of this purity involved regular washing of the body and, for women, covering of the head to partially conceal the hair. Keeping the hair long - and for men, the beard - was seen as a mark of purity. Notably, Anicetian theology had no concept of indulgences or priestly forgiveness of sin, viewing absolution as a lifelong process of maintaining purity as best as possible, with only God capable of passing final judgment. It also had no bar against women becoming pure: The belief system was highly accessible to especially lower-class women, and many early Anicetians were peasant mothers who passed their beliefs on to their children. Women and men both served as spiritual leaders, often so chosen for their wisdom and age.
Most notable, however, was the Anicetian view on church authority: They viewed the Catholic Church itself as having lost its legitimacy by concerning itself more with wealth and the affairs of kings than with the salvation of humanity, and they viewed the Papacy as a corrupted institution and the actual spiritual leadership of Christendom as essentially vacant. The Anicetians viewed religious authority as residing with the commons, exercised in the form of ecumenical councils. Anicetian communities operated as early forms of council ecumenism, in which religious leaders and respected elders consulted together to make decisions and in which there was no figure analogous to the Pope.
It was this view of the Church that saw Anicetian beliefs explode in Iberia following the War of Navarrese Succession. The war had been a disaster for the Kingdom of Santiago, their kingdom soundly defeated by the southern Muslims. By the Anicetian telling, the defeat of Santiago - and the failure of the long-predicted Reconquista - was a consequence of Christianity's moral decline and the Church's descent into corruption. They viewed their Muslim neighbours as spiritually and morally superior to the corrupt institution of the Church, with a moral clarity that gave them an advantage over their corrupted northern neighbours. Many mainline Catholics, struggling with feelings of abandonment by France and the Church, found the Anicetians' philosophies to ring true.
As Santiago splintered into warring counties and duchies, the Anicetians found themselves with enormous influence over one of the most powerful lords. The Normando division of the former kingdoms of Gallaecia and Leon had carved out a number of duchies, and one of the most central was that of Felipe, Duke of Sanabria. While his seat lay at a Normando fort in Ribadelago on the coast of Lake Sanabria, his dominion extended to several key cities, encompassing Astorga, Ponferrada, Lugo and Braganza. Felipe himself was of Normando extraction, but his mother came from the Santiagonian royal family, giving him a distant claim to the throne.
Felipe's sympathies for the Anicetians were quiet, but evident. He made no moves to persecute them, permitting them to build their own churches in cities under his control, and he allowed them to serve as members of his council and appear at his court. They formed a key base of support for the ambitious duke's efforts to press his claim against the usurper king Bermudo III, who held Santiago, Ourense, Pontevedra and Corunna but had few allies east of that.
As the Anicetians grew in influence in Sanabria, more and more commoners took interest. The concept of conciliarism - the derivation of religious authority not from the church, but from councils of learned men - continued to spread to Europe as it gained exposure through meetings between Anicetians and pilgrims on the Way of Saint James. From the spread of Tellianism to Iberia, the seeds of pushback against Papal supremacy began to blossom.