The Khazar Mission

Around 860–861 the brothers were sent by the emperor on an embassy to the Khazars, the powerful steppe people north of the Black Sea, who had asked Constantinople for a learned man to discuss religion. The Vita Constantini gives the journey at length: a winter of study at Cherson in the Crimea, where Constantine learned languages and prepared himself; the recovery there of the relics of St. Clement of Rome; and at the khagan’s court a series of disputations with Jewish and Muslim scholars over the merits of the three faiths. This file sets out the mission as the sources present it and weighs what can be known of its course and outcome.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)

The Embassy and Its Purpose

The Khazar khaganate in the ninth century was a steppe empire of the first rank, stretching from the Volga and the Caucasus toward the Crimea, controlling the trade routes between the Black and Caspian seas, and important to Byzantium as a counterweight to the Arabs and a guardian of the empire’s northern frontier (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 4; Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, 1970, ch. 2). Its ruling élite had, at some point in the preceding century, adopted Judaism, while its population included Muslims, Christians, and adherents of the old steppe religion — a genuine religious plurality (Dvornik 1970, ch. 2; Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, ch. 7).

According to the Vita Constantini, an embassy came from the Khazars to the emperor Michael III asking that a learned man be sent to them, for, they said, Jews and Saracens were pressing them each to adopt their own faith, and they wished to hear the Christian case (Vita Constantini 8; trans. Kantor 1983). The emperor and the patriarch chose Constantine, who asked that his brother Methodius accompany him, and the two set out (Vita Constantini 8; Kantor 1983; Dvornik 1970, ch. 2). The mission is usually dated to c. 860–861 on the reconstructed chronology of the brothers’ careers, falling between Constantine’s Constantinopolitan years and the Moravian summons (Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 3; Dvornik 1970, ch. 2). It should be read as an act of the religious diplomacy that characterized the Photian age — an instrument of policy as much as of evangelization (see The Photian Age).

The Winter at Cherson

The brothers’ route took them across the Black Sea to Cherson (Chersonesus), the Byzantine outpost in the Crimea, where they wintered before continuing to the Khazar court (Vita Constantini 8; Kantor 1983). The Cherson sojourn is given prominence in the Life as a period of intense preparation. Constantine, it reports, devoted himself to study: he learned Hebrew and the Samaritan script and language so as to be ready to dispute with the Jews on their own ground, and he is also said to have encountered, in some form, the language and letters of other peoples (Vita Constantini 8; Kantor 1983; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 3). One celebrated and much-debated passage reports that at Cherson Constantine found a gospel and psalter written in “Rus’ian letters” (rousьskymi pismeny) and a man who spoke that tongue, from whom he learned to read it (Vita Constantini 8; Kantor 1983). [Disputed: the meaning of the “Rus’ian letters” is contested — some scholars take rousьsky as a genuine reference to an early Crimean Slavic or proto-Rus writing (Vernadsky and others); many read it as a textual corruption or copyist’s error for sourьsky, “Syrian/Syriac,” which fits the context of Constantine’s Semitic studies (so a long line of philologists); still others regard the whole notice as legendary embroidery; the question remains open (discussion in Dvornik 1970, ch. 2; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2).] Whatever the truth of that crux, the Cherson winter is presented by the source as the seedbed of Constantine’s linguistic method — the disciplined acquisition of scripts and tongues that would shortly be turned to the creation of a Slavic alphabet (see The Invention of the Alphabet).

It was also at Cherson that Constantine undertook the recovery of relics he and his contemporaries identified as those of St. Clement of Rome, an episode of such later importance that it is treated separately (see Relics of Clement of Rome).

The Disputations at the Khagan’s Court

From Cherson the brothers proceeded to the Khazar court — the location is not securely known, somewhere in the region of the Sea of Azov or the lower Volga (Dvornik 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 3). The Vita Constantini devotes several of its longest chapters to the disputations there, presenting them as a formal, multi-day debate before the khagan and his nobles, in which Constantine answered the objections of Jewish and Muslim scholars and argued the truth of the Christian faith (Vita Constantini 9–11; trans. Kantor 1983). The questions canvassed in the Life are the standard matter of ninth-century inter-religious polemic: the doctrine of the Trinity against Jewish and Muslim monotheism, the Incarnation, the use of images, the relation of the Old Covenant to the New, the abrogation of the Mosaic law, and the comparative claims of the three Scriptures (Vita Constantini 9–11; Kantor 1983; Dvornik 1970, ch. 2).

These chapters must be read for what they are. The disputations are rendered as polished theological dialogue, and they almost certainly preserve, in literary form, the apologetic positions Constantine held and taught rather than a stenographic record of a steppe debate; the Life’s account is a worked-up composition, perhaps drawing on a longer disputation-text Constantine himself wrote and his disciples abridged (Dvornik 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 3). Several scholars connect this material with the lost Greek apologetic writings attributed to Constantine; the Slavic Life claims to have abridged a fuller account (Vita Constantini 9; Kantor 1983; Dvornik 1970, ch. 2). The historical core — that Constantine, a trained Byzantine dialectician, conducted religious disputations at a religiously plural court — is entirely credible; the elaborated arguments are the Vita’s testimony to his apologetic, not an independently verified transcript (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Outcome

What the mission achieved is harder to state than what the Life narrates. The Vita Constantini reports that the disputations bore fruit: a number of the Khazars — the Life gives a figure of some two hundred — received baptism, and the brothers departed with the khagan’s goodwill, declining the rich gifts offered them and asking instead for the release of Byzantine captives (Vita Constantini 11; Kantor 1983). But the Khazar ruling élite did not convert to Christianity; the khaganate’s official tradition remained Jewish, and there is no sign that the mission turned the Khazars toward Constantinople in any lasting way (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 2; Vlasto 1970, ch. 7). The realistic assessment of scholarship is that the Khazar embassy was a diplomatic and apologetic exercise with modest immediate results — but that for the brothers themselves it was formative: it gave them their first joint experience of mission to a non-Greek people, tested Constantine’s method of meeting other faiths in their own languages, and, through the Clementine relics, forged the bond with Rome that would shape everything that followed (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 3; Dvornik 1970, ch. 2). The mission’s deeper significance lay less in Khazaria than in what the brothers carried away from it: a tested apologetic, a recovered relic, and a method that would within a year or two produce the Slavic letters.

References

Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine), chapters 8–12. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970, ch. 2.
Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, ch. 3.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, ch. 4.
Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, chs. 2, 7.