Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  There followed similar visits from the Germans, representing the Latin church, and the Khazars, representing Judaism, both of whom also failed to win Vladimir's allegiance. The Germans prompted his rejection by revealing that their faith called for fasting, while the Khazars derailed themselves by bringing up the Diaspora. This led Vladimir to expostulate, “If God loved you and your faith, you would not be thus dispersed in foreign lands. Do you expect us to accept that fate also?”

  Each of these episodes gets a paragraph in the Primary Chronicle. But then from Byzantium comes “a scholar” who gets more than ten pages, giving a long summary of world history à la the Old and New Testaments, which is moved along in the text by periodic questions from the obviously rapt Vladimir. The “scholar” introduces his lengthy disquisition by saying that the Byzantine version of Christianity is similar to that of the Germans, but that the Germans “have modified the faith” by introducing novelties such as unleavened bread in the Eucharist.

  After consulting his boyars, Vladimir then sent out emissaries to visit in turn the Volga Bulgars, the Germans, and the Byzantines and report on how they worshiped. The Bulgars and Germans received the envoys cordially enough, but couldn't compete with Hagia Sophia, where the emperor and patriarch invited the Russians to join a service. On entering the great church, the envoys later reported, “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men.” Vladimir and his boyars, the Primary Chronicle says, now resolved to be baptized into the Byzantine version of the Christian faith.

  That's the story from the Russian sources, looking back. The Byzantine sources have their own perspective on the conversion of the Rus, one that may be better grounded in reality.

  During much of the tenth century, during Basil's minority and that of his grandfather Constantine VII Porphy-rogenitus before him, the Byzantine government had been controlled by powerful generals acting as regents and co-emperors. These figures have intruded themselves into our narrative more than once. Such men were the scions of the great military families in the provinces, especially in Asia Minor, families who were in large part responsible for the victories over the Arabs that expanded imperial territory eastward over the course of the century. As the great families jockeyed for influence at court, rivalries developed among them, and it was such a rivalry that had led to the murder of Nicephorus Phocas by John Tzimisces in 969.

  Over the next two decades of civil strife, the feud between the Phocas family and its enemies dominated Byzantine politics. Basil hung on, patiently working to reclaim power from the feuding generals, who commanded what were essentially private armies, imperial in name only, and larger than anything Basil could muster. Finally, after dispatching his rivals, Nicephorus Phocas’ nephew Bardas rebelled openly against Basil in 987, and was proclaimed emperor by his troops. He controlled virtually the whole empire, while Basil had only Constantinople itself, where he was surrounded and cut off.

  But in Byzantine politics, whoever ruled in Constantinople retained the aura of legitimate power, no matter how bad things were elsewhere. And they were bad. Basil was challenged not only by Bardas Phocas but by a rebellion in Bulgaria, where the tsar Samuel had taken advantage of Byzantine confusion to throw off imperial rule. This had been imposed directly on Bulgaria by John Tzimisces, as part of the campaigns in which Svyatoslav had participated. In 986, the Bulgarians had caught Basil's army unawares and wiped it out in ambush as the Byzantines retreated through a steep mountain pass. From this point on, Basil would be grimly obsessed with Bulgaria's utter reduction, and his bloody fulfillment ofthat goal would ultimately win him the epithet Bulgaroctonos, “Bulgar-slayer.”

  In 988, Basil's victory over Bulgaria lay far in the future. His most urgent priority was simple survival. Most importantly, to meet the armies of Bardas Phocas, Basil needed soldiers, and for that there was really only one place to turn.

  Basil sent a delegation to Vladimir asking for a large detachment of troops, and in the negotiations that followed, the Byzantine emperor showed exactly how desperate the situation was by offering Vladimir his own sister Anna—a born-in-the-purple Byzantine princess, no less—in marriage.

  This was a great opportunity for Vladimir, and an unheard-of concession to a barbarian ruler from the north. It would have absolutely scandalized Basil's grandfather, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who in his voluminous writings on imperial comportment was very clear that sullying the royal bloodline with such an alliance was out of the question.

  Aside from the troops, Basil's only conditions in making this unprecedented offer were that Vladimir be baptized into Christianity and renounce his other wives. Vladimir accepted the offer, sent a reported six thousand troops to Basil, and was duly baptized. With the Russian troops Basil defeated the rebels and won sole control of the empire. The Russians stayed, eventually forming the famous crack unit known as the Varangian Guard, the emperor's elite, distinctive, and highly loyal personal guard at the Great Palace in Constantinople.

  Back in Kiev, Vladimir instituted Christian worship with the same zeal he had earlier shown for the pagan gods, which he now publicly spurned:

  When the Prince arrived at his capital, he directed that the idols should be overthrown, and that some should be cut to pieces and others burned with fire. He thus ordered that Perun should be bound to a horse's tail and dragged down … to the stream. He appointed twelve men to beat the idol with sticks…. After they had thus dragged the idol along, they cast it into the Dnieper.

  He ordered the Kievans to undergo baptism as well, an order they received with exemplary good cheer and trust, saying (at least according to the monks who wrote the Primary Chronicle), “If this were not good, the Prince and his boyars would not have accepted it.” Surely not.

  Vladimir also took steps to spread the new faith throughout Kiev's growing empire. “He began to found churches and to assign priests throughout the cities, and to invite the people to accept baptism in all the towns and cities.” But the most impressive churches were erected in the capital itself, with Byzantine help and inspired by Byzantine models. Where he had stood and uprooted the pagan idols Vladimir built a large church dedicated to his patron saint, Basil. On an even grander scale, he brought in Byzantine artists and craftsmen to construct a great church dedicated to the Holy Virgin, as part of a new, richly appointed royal palace complex on Old Kiev Hill, where he lived with his porphyrogenita bride.

  From Byzantium came not only clerics to spread the gospel and man the new churches but also architects, artists, and craftsmen to decorate them, and to pass on their knowledge to Slavic apprentices. Within just a few years, the skyline of Kiev was completely altered; a visitor from the West, one Thietmar, bishop of Merseberg and a contemporary of Vladimir's, reported Kiev to be a magnificent city with some forty churches and eight marketplaces.

  This transformation was nonetheless dwarfed by cultural changes that proceeded in tandem with the material ones. Vladimir's prestigious marriage alliance and his conversion to Christianity helped him secure his own position in Kiev. He was soon minting Byzantine-style gold and silver coins showing his royal self enthroned on one side, and the Byzantine Christ Pantocrator (“ruler of all”) on the other.

  Most of all, in converting his people Vladimir gave them a collective identity—as Christians and, before long, as Russians.

  The Legacy of Cyril and Methodius in Russia

  Immediately after “inviting” his people to convert, Vladimir took steps to see that they had at least some idea of what they were converting to. In addition to sending out priests to the towns and cities, he initiated an educational program that targeted the children of his most influential subjects: “He took the children of the best families,” the Primary Chronicle tells us, “and sent them for instruction in book-learning. The mothers of these children,” the chronicler continues blandly, “wept bitterly over them, for t
hey were not yet strong in faith, but mourned as for the dead.”

  What Vladimir was doing here was more than just cleverly if coldheartedly indoctrinating his future ruling class. Since, like the Bulgarians before them, the Russians had had no alphabet before becoming Christians, Vladimir was also founding what would turn out to be one of the world's greatest literary traditions.

  The “book-learning” with which these young students were inculcated was nothing other than the by now substantial body of Old Church Slavonic writings that constituted the legacy of saints Cyril and Methodius. That same Slavonic heritage, still flourishing in Bulgaria, found an even more momentous incarnation in Russia, where it became the dominant factor in the shaping of early Russian civilization.

  The Primary Chronicle clearly recognizes this. The unknown chronicler prominently covers the missions to Moravia and Bulgaria, pointing out the Russians’ cultural debt and proudly celebrating the common Slavic heritage as shaped by the Cyrillo-Methodian legacy. “It was for these Moravians that Slavic books were first written, and this writing prevails also in Rus and among the Danubian Bulgarians.”

  Under Vladimir's son Yaroslav the Wise, this legacy reached its apogee, giving rise to the golden age of Kievan Rus. Under Yaroslav, Byzantine artists and artisans continued their work in Russia. Among the scores of churches Yaroslav built with Byzantine help, the most famous is St. Sophia in Kiev (1037-46), clearly inspired by the Constantinopolitan original, and where the visitor can see some of the finest surviving examples of eleventh-century Byzantine mosaics and frescoes.

  Yaroslav's epithet hints at what the Primary Chronicle says explicitly over and over: that the Russian ruler was above all a “lover of books.”

  He applied himself to books, and read them continually day and night. He assembled many scribes, and translated from Greek into Slavic. He wrote and collected many books through which true believers are instructed and enjoy religious education…. For great is the profit from book-learning. Through the medium of books, we are shown and taught the way of repentance, for we gain wisdom and continence from the written word. Books are like rivers that water the whole earth; they are the springs of wisdom. For books have an immeasurable depth; by them we are consoled in sorrow.

  We don't know where Yaroslav's translators came from. Some were Russians, while others were probably Byzantine Greeks or Slavs, and it seems almost certain that there were Bulgarian monks, priests, and scholars among them as well.

  Nor do we know exactly what works were translated, since Old Church Slavonic manuscripts are notoriously hard to date with certainty. Until the twelfth century or so Old Church Slavonic was unusually uniform, so that a tenth-century Bulgarian manuscript looks and reads much like an eleventh-century Russian one. This homogeneous quality itself testifies to the quality and staying power of Cyril's philological achievement.

  But scholars have suggested a number of works that may have been translated at this time. Not all are from the Byzantine religious corpus. They include of course numerous lives of saints, monastic rules, and liturgical works, but also legal texts, the Christian Topography of the explorer Cosmas Indicopleustes, and a handful of secular works such as Josephus’ History of the Jewish War and, perhaps, the Byzantine epic of the ninth-century Arab border wars, Digenes Akritas.

  As the Slavic dialects evolved into national tongues marked by mutual incomprehensibility, Old Church Slavonic carried on as the international language of the Byzantine Commonwealth. Only when taken up by the Russians, however, was this status ensured. Its unlikely ricochet success, more than a century after its near extinction in Moravia, helped seal forever the prestige of Cyril's unique and brilliant invention.

  On the other hand, by allowing the Slavs to receive Christianity in their own language, Old Church Slavonic delayed their exposure to the rich pre-Christian past, to which the Catholics’ insistence on Latin acted as a gateway for churchmen in the various Western European countries, and to which educated Byzantines had access by virtue of their expertise in Greek. Likewise, if Old Church Slavonic offered the Slavs their own distinctive idiom, it also isolated them from ongoing developments in the rest of European civilization, which expressed its high culture in Latin and Greek. In this way, the glittering legacy of Cyril and Methodius has been both a blessing and a burden for the Slavic world.

  Kiev's Golden Age

  Yaroslav expanded on the foundations laid by his father, Vladimir, to bring Kiev to its fullest flowering under Byzantine tutelage, as architects, artists, and artisans arrived from Byzantium to build, work, and teach in this new Orthodox Christian venue. Militarily, too, the Kievan state, which now took in a vast territory, flaunted its confidence during Yaroslav's reign by crushing the Petchenegs and again attacking Constantinople, in 1043.

  This dispute arose over trade issues, after a brawl between Byzantine and Russian merchants in which a prominent Russian was killed. The fighting was bitter and bloody, and the Russian force of some four hundred ships was virtually destroyed, its men either killed or captured. Some of the prisoners had their right hands cut off, which were then displayed on the city's walls for the edification of the public. Others, some eight hundred of them, were blinded, which was the traditional Byzantine punishment for those who had rebelled against the imperial government (Basil II had famously inflicted the same treatment on Bulgarian prisoners). It was the last time the Russians would carry out such an attack.

  As earlier, armed conflict proved no impediment to commerce and cultural diffusion. After protracted negotiations the fighting was settled by another trade agreement, and the Russians continued apace their thirsty consumption of Byzantine Christianity and the whole ready-to-wear cultural ensemble that came with it.

  Shortly after the war, another marriage alliance between the two ruling houses demonstrated the continuing strength of these ties. The marriage itself was between Yaroslav's son Vsevolod and an unnamed daughter of the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachus. The offspring of that marriage, known as Vladimir II Monomakh, would eventually take the lead in the losing battle to shore up Kiev's central authority, which proceeded to dissipate among the various Russian principalities after Yaroslav's death in 1056.

  This process is often presented in textbooks as “the decline of Kievan Rus,” which is somewhat misleading. The basic political problem for Kiev was the persistent tension between influences that favored centralized political power in Russia and influences that hindered it. Kiev's rulers struggled to build a centralized state. Yet, working against this effort was the Russian custom of dividing an inheritance equally among the sons, which as it expressed itself in the division of political power within ruling dynasties is called the appanage system. The appanage system is a good example of an area in which Byzantine practices were not picked up by the Russians (another was in the codification of Russian law, the Russkaya Pravda, that took place under Yaroslav).

  Vladimir the Great, for example, had twelve sons, and each had to get his inheritance, with Kiev itself as the grand prize—literally, since its ruler was styled the “grand prince.” Later, other principalities would wrangle over the aggrandizing title. Because the various sons of a Kievan grand prince would typically each hope to be given a city over which to rule, the appanage system tended to pit these princes against each other. And of course it made succession in Kiev, theoretically the capital, a perennially tricky issue. Such problems were reinforced by the often intense commercial rivalries between the cities.

  Vladimir II Monomakh's reign as grand prince of Kiev, which lasted from 1113 to 1125, represents the last hurrah of central authority against the internecine strife endemic to the appanage system. It's tempting to characterize Vladimir's push to uphold Kiev's authority as a reflection of his Byzantine heritage, Byzantium being generally regarded as a bastion of absolutism, but to make this connection in more than a symbolic way would be a stretch.

  More concrete evidence of Vladimir's Byzantine background comes from a cycle of frescoe
s, probably done during his reign, in Kiev's Church of St. Sophia. The frescoes decorate the walls and vaults of two staircases leading up to the area where the prince's family sat for worship. Set in Constantinople, they depict scenes from the Hippodrome, showing the famous chariot races, as well as jugglers, acrobats, and jousters. The emperor is seen presiding over the games, in crown and imperial robes, and in one scene he rides a white horse in a triumphal procession. The scenes may have been described to Vladimir by his mother, the Byzantine princess whose name has been lost to history.

  These frescoes reveal the intimate connection between Byzantine and Russian politics at this time. In Byzantium, such games publicly symbolized the emperor's majesty and authority, and modern scholars have seen the frescoes as Vladimir's attempt to extend the emperor's symbolic sway over Russia as well. Not that there was any notion of actual political sovereignty. But as the supreme head of the Orthodox empire, in Byzantine theory at least the emperor held a position of special authority over all Orthodox Christians, no matter what political regime they actually lived under.

  This conception of the emperor's idealized rule as transcending the merely political would survive Kiev's decline to influence Byzantine patronage of Moscow. In the age to come, when the emperor's actual dominion was slight, his symbolic dominion would still count for much.