A history of Russia
Page 6
But the Byzantine state, ruled from 969 by the famous military leader Emperor John Tzimisces, had become fully aware of the new danger. As Sviatoslav would not leave the Balkans, a bitter war ensued. In his characteristic manner the Russian prince rapidly crossed the Balkan mountains and invaded the Byzantine Empire, capturing Philippopolis and threatening Adrianople and Constantinople itself. However, John Tzimisces managed in the nick of time to restore his position in Asia, which had been threatened by both a foreign war and a rebellion, and to shift his main effort to the Balkans. He counterattacked, crossing in his turn the Balkan range and capturing Great Preslav, the Bulgarian capital. The Russian army, its lines of communication endangered, had to retreat to the fortress of Dorostolon on the Danube - present-day Dristra or Silistria - which, after a hard-fought battle, John Tzimisces placed under siege. Following more desperate fighting, in July 971 Sviatoslav was finally reduced to making peace with Byzantium on condition of abandoning the Balkans, as well as the Crimea, and promising not to challenge the Byzantine Empire in the future. On his way back to Russia, with a small retinue, he was intercepted and killed by the Pechenegs. Tradition has it that the Pecheneg khan had a drinking cup made out of Sviatoslav's skull. The great adventure had come to its end. Sviatoslav's Balkan wars attract attention not only because of the issues involved but also because of the sizes of the contending armies and because of their place in military history; Byzantine sources indicate that Sviatoslav fought at the head of 60,000 troops of whom 22,000 remained when peace was concluded.
After the death of his mother Olga in 969, Sviatoslav, constantly away with the army, entrusted the administration of the Kiev area to his elder son Iaropolk, dispatched the second son Oleg to govern the territory of the Drevliane, and sent the third, the young Vladimir, with an older relative to manage Novgorod. A civil war among the brothers followed Sviatoslav's death. At first Iaropolk had the upper hand, Oleg perishing in the struggle and Vladimir escaping abroad. But in two years Vladimir returned and with foreign mercenaries and local support defeated and killed Iaropolk. About 980 he became the ruler of the entire Kievan realm.
Kiev at the Zenith
Vladimir, who reigned until 1015, continued in most respects the policies of his predecessors. Among the East Slavs, he reaffirmed the authority of the Kievan state which had been badly shaken during the years of civil war. He recovered Galician towns from Poland and, further to the north, subdued the warlike Baltic tribe of the Iatviags, extending his domain in that area to the Baltic Sea. Vladimir also made a major and generally successful effort to contain the Pechenegs. He built fortresses and towns, brought settlers into the frontier districts, and managed to push the steppe border to two days, rather than a single day, of travel time from Kiev.
However, Vladimir's great fame rests on his relations with Byzantium and, most especially, on his adoption of Christianity, which proved to be of immense significance and long outlasted the specific political and cultural circumstances that led to the step. Interest in Christianity was not unprecedented among the Russians. In fact, there may even have been a Russian diocese of the Byzantine Church as early as 867, although not all scholars agree on this inference from a particular tantalizing passage in an early document. Whether or not an early Christian Rus existed on the shores of the Sea of Azov, Kiev itself certainly experienced Christian influences before the time of Vladimir. A Christian church existed in Kiev in the reign of Igor, and we know that Olga, Vladimir's grandmother, became a Christian; Vladimir's brother Iaropolk has also been described as favorably inclined to Christianity. But it should be emphasized that Olga's conversion did not affect the pagan faith of her subjects and, furthermore, that, in the first part of the reign of Vladimir, Kievan Russia experienced a strong pagan revival. Vladimir's turnabout and the resulting "baptism of Russia" were accompanied by an intricate series of developments that has been given different explications and interpretations by scholars: Vladimir's military aid to Emperor Basil II of Byzantium, the siege and capture by the Russians of the Byzantine outpost of Chersonesus in the Crimea, and Vladimir's marriage to Anne, Basil II's sister. Whatever the exact import and motivation of these and certain other events, the Kievan Russians formally accepted Christianity from Constantinople in or around 988 and probably in or near Kiev, although some historians prefer Chersonesus.
The conversion of Kievan Russia to Christianity fits into a broad historical pattern. At about the same time similar conversions from paganism were taking place among some of the Baltic Slavs, and in Poland, Hungary, Denmark, and Norway. Christendom in effect was spreading rapidly across all of Europe, with only a few remote peoples, such as the Lithuanians, holding out. Nevertheless, it can well be argued that Vladimir's decision represented a real and extremely important choice. The legendary account
of how the Russians selected their religion, spurning Islam because it prohibited alcohol - for "drink is the joy of the Russian" - and Judaism because it expressed the beliefs of a defeated people without a state, and opting for Byzantine liturgy and faith, contains a larger meaning: Russia did lie at cultural crossroads, and it had contacts not only with Byzantium and other Christian neighbors but also with the Moslem state of the Volga
Bulgars and other more distant Moslems to the southeast as well as with the Jewish Khazars. In other words, Vladimir and his associates chose to become the Eastern flank of Christendom rather than an extension into Europe of non-Christian civilizations. In doing so, they opened wide the gates for the highly developed Byzantine culture to enter their land. Kievan literature, art, law, manners, and customs experienced a fundamental impact of Byzantium. The most obvious result of the conversion was the appearance in Kievan Russia of the Christian Church itself, a new and extremely important institution which was to play a role similar to that of the Church in other parts of medieval Europe. But Christianity, as already indicated, remained by no means confined to the Church, permeating instead Kievan society and culture, a subject to which we shall return in later chapters. In politics too it gave the Kievan prince and state a stronger ideological basis, urging the unity of the country and at the same time emphasizing its links with Byzantium and with the Christian world as a whole. Dvornik, Obolensky, Meyendorff, and many other scholars have given us a rich picture of the Byzantine heritage and of the Russian borrowing from it.
It must be kept in mind that Christianity came to Russia from Byzantium, not from Rome. Although at the time this distinction did not have its later significance and although the break between the Eastern and the Western Churches occurred only in 1054, the Russian allegiance to Byzantium determined or helped to determine much of the subsequent history of the country. It meant that Russia remained outside the Roman Catholic Church, and this in turn not only deprived Russia of what that Church itself had to offer, but also contributed in a major way to the relative isolation of Russia from the rest of Europe and its Latin civilization. It helped notably to inspire Russian suspicions of the West and the tragic enmity between the Russians and the Poles. On the other side, one can well argue that Vladimir's turn to Constantinople represented the richest and the most rewarding spiritual, cultural, and political choice that he could make at the time. Even the absence of Latinism and the emphasis on local languages had its advantages: it brought religion, in the form of a readily understandable Slavic rite, close to the people and gave a powerful impetus to the development of a national culture. In addition to being remembered as a mighty and successful ruler, Vladimir was canonized by the Church as the baptizer of the Russians, "equal to the apostles."
Vladimir's death in 1015 led to another civil war. Several of Vladimir's sons who had served in different parts of the realm as their father's lieutenants and had acquired local support became involved in the struggle. The eldest among them, Sviatopolk, triumphed over several rivals and profited from strong Polish aid, only to be finally defeated in 1019 by another son Iaroslav, who resumed the conflict from his base in Novgorod.
Sviato
polk's traditional appelation in Russian history can be roughly translated as "the Damned," and his listed crimes - true or false, for Iaroslav was the ultimate victor - include the assassination of three of his brothers, Sviatoslav, Boris, and Gleb. The latter two became saints of the Orthodox Church.
Prince Iaroslav, known in history as Iaroslav the Wise, ruled in Kiev from 1019 until his death in 1054. His reign has been generally acclaimed as the high point of Kievan development and success. Yet, especially in its first part, it was fraught with danger, and the needs of the state continued to demand strenuous exertion from the prince and his subjects. Civil war did not end with Iaroslav's occupation of Kiev. In fact, he had to flee it and ultimately, by an agreement of 1026, divide the realm with his brother Mstislav the Brave, prince of Tmutorokan, a principality situated in the area where the Kuban flows into the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea: Iaroslav kept Kiev and authority over the lands west of the Dnieper; Mstislav secured as his domain the territory east of it, with the center in Chernigov. Only after the death of Mstislav in 1036 did Iaroslav become the ruler of the entire Kievan state, and even then the Polotsk district retained a separate prince. Besides fighting for his throne, Iaroslav had to suppress a whole series of local rebellions, ranging from a militant pagan revival in the Suzdal area to the uprisings of various Finnish and Lithuanian tribes.
laroslav's foreign wars included a successful effort in 1031 to recover from Poland the southwestern section which that country obtained in return for supporting Sviatopolk, and an unsuccessful campaign against Byzantium some twelve years later which proved to be the last in the long sequence of Russian military undertakings against Constantinople. But especial significance attaches to laroslav's struggle with the attacking Peche-negs in 1037: the decisive Russian victory broke the might of the invaders and led to a quarter-century of relative peace on the steppe frontier, until the arrival from the east of new enemies, the Polovtsy.
At the time of Iaroslav the prestige of the Kievan state stood at its zenith; the state itself stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the mouth of the Oka river to the Carpathian mountains, and the Kievan ruling family enjoyed close connections with many other reigning houses of Europe. Himself the husband of a Swedish princess, Iaroslav obtained the hands of three European princesses for three of his sons and married his three daughters to the kings of France, Hungary, and Norway; one of his sisters became the wife of the Polish king, another the wife of a Byzantine prince. Iaroslav offered asylum to exiled rulers and princes, such as the princes who fled from England and Hungary and St. Olaf, the king of Norway, with his son, and his cousin Harold Hardrada. It should be added that
while the links with the rest of Europe were particularly numerous in the
reign of Iaroslav, they were in general a rather common occurrence in Kievan Russia. Following Baumgarten, Vernadsky has calculated, for instance, that six Kievan matrimonial alliances were established with Hungary, five with Bohemia, some fifteen with Poland, and at least eleven with Germany, or, to be more precise on the last point, at least six Russian princes had German wives, while "two German marquises, one count, one landgrave, and one emperor had Russian wives."
Iaroslav's great fame, however, rests more on his actions at home than on his activities in foreign relations. His name stands connected with an impressive religious revival, and with Kievan law, education, architecture, and art. Church affairs of the reign present certain very intricate puzzles to the historian. For some reason Kievan sources, and most importantly the Primary Chronicle, virtually omit Russian ecclesiastical history from the conversion in 988 to 1037, and, furthermore, give the impression that the years around the latter date, at the time of Iaroslav, produced a new departure in Russian Christianity, marked by such a strange act as the consecration in 1039 of a Kievan church which had been erected by Vladimir. In search of an explanation, Priselkov suggested that until 1037 the Russian Church was linked to the Bulgarian archbishopric of Ochrid rather than to Byzantium. Some specialists proposed that the Church at Kiev turned from Constantinople to Rome or simply took an independent and disobedient stand vis-a-vis Constantinople. A more recent interpretation, by Stokes, shifted the emphasis from international ecclesiastical politics to the internal history of the Kievan state and argued that the change under Iaroslav consisted in the transfer of the religious center of Russia, the seat of the metropolitan, from its original location in the city of Pereiaslavl, east of the Dnieper, to Kiev. At least until further evidence, it seems best to assume that Russia remained under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine Church and also had its own metropolitan, whether in Kiev or Pereiaslavl, from the time of the conversion. Whatever the interpretation of its pre-1037 development, Iaroslav did leave an impact on the Russian Church, changing or confirming its organization, having an able and educated Russian, Hilarion, serve as the first native metropolitan, and building and supporting churches and monasteries on a large scale. He has usually been credited with a major role in the dissemination and consolidation of Christianity in Russia.
Iaroslav the Wise has the reputation also of a lawgiver, for he has generally been considered responsible for the first Russian legal code, The Russian Justice, an invaluable source for our knowledge of Kievan society and life. And he played a significant role in Kievan culture by such measures as his patronage of artists and architects and the establishment of a large school and a library in Kiev.
The Decline and Fall of the Kievan State
Before his death Iaroslav assigned separate princedoms to his sons: Iziaslav, the eldest, received the Kiev and Novgorod areas; Sviatoslav, the second, the area centered on Chernigov; Vsevolod, the third, Pereiaslavl; Viacheslav, the fourth, Smolensk; and Igor, the fifth, Vladimir-in-Volynia - always with their surrounding territories. The princes, apparently, were expected to co-operate and to hold Kievan Russia together. Moreover, it would seem that when a vacancy occurred, they were to move up step by step, with the position in Kiev the summit. Some such moves did in fact take place, but the system - if indeed it can be called a system - quickly bogged down: Iaroslav's arrangement, based quite possibly on old clan concepts and relations still present in the ruling family, worked to break the natural link between a prince and his state, and it excluded sons from succession in favor of their uncles, their late father's brothers. Besides, with a constant increase in the number of princes, precise calculations of appropriate appointments became extremely difficult. At their meeting in Liubech in 1097 the princes agreed that the practice of succession from father to son should prevail. Yet the principle of rotation from brother to brother remained linked for a long time to the most important seat of all, that of the Grand Prince in Kiev.
The reigns of Iziaslav, Sviatoslav, and Vsevolod, the last of whom died in 1093, as well as that of Iziaslav's son Sviatopolk, who succeeded Vsevolod and ruled until his death in 1113, present a frightening record of virtually constant civil wars which failed to resolve with any degree of permanence the problem of political power in Kievan Russia. At the same time the Kievan state had to face a new major enemy, the Polovtsy, or the Cumans as they are known to Western authors. This latest wave of Turkic invaders from Asia had defeated the Pechenegs, pushing them toward the Danube, and had occupied the southeastern steppe. They attacked Kievan territory for the first time in 1061, and after that initial assault became a persistent threat to the security and even existence of Kievan Russia and a constant drain on its resources.
Although hard beset, the Kievan state had one more revival, under an outstanding ruler, Vladimir Monomakh. A son of Grand Prince Vsevolod, Vladimir Monomakh became prominent in the political life of the country long before he formally assumed the highest authority: he acted with and for his father in many matters and he took the lead at princely conferences, such as those of 1097 and 1100 to settle internecine disputes or that of 1103 to concert action in defense of the steppe border. Also, he played a major role in the actual fighting against the Polovtsy, obtaining perhaps his
greatest victory over them, in 1111 at Salnitsa, before his elevation to the Kievan seat. As Grand Prince, that is, from 1113 until his death in 1125, Vladimir Monomakh fought virtually all the time. He waged war in Livonia, Finland, the land of the Volga Bulgars, and the Danubian area, repulsing the Poles and the Hungarians among others; but above all he campaigned against the Polovtsy. His remarkable Testament speaks of a grand total of eighty-three major campaigns and also of the killing of two hundred Polovetsian princes; according to tradition, Polovetsian mothers used to scare their children with his name. Vladimir Monomakh distinguished himself as an effective and indefatigable organizer and administrator, a builder, for instance, possibly, of the town of Vladimir in the northeast on the river Kliazma, which was to become in two generations the seat of the grand prince, and also as a writer of note. Of special interest is his social legislation intended to help the poor, in particular the debtors.
Vladimir Monomakh was succeeded by his able and energetic son Mstislav (ruled 1125-32) and after him by another son, Iaropolk, who reigned until his death in 1139. But before long the Kievan seat became again the object of bitter contention and civil war which often followed the classic Kievan pattern of a struggle between uncles and nephews. In 1169 one of the contenders, Prince Andrew, or Andrei, Bogoliubskii of the northeastern principalities of Rostov and Suzdal, not only stormed and sacked Kiev but, after his victory in the civil war, transferred the capital to his favorite city of Vladimir. Andrew Bogoliubskii's action both represented the personal preference of the new grand prince and reflected a striking decline in importance of the city on the Dnieper. Kiev was sacked again in 1203. Finally, it suffered virtually complete destruction in 1240, at the hands of the Mongols.