The Pagan Prince

Vladimir before his conversion, as the Russian Primary Chronicle portrays him: the son of the warrior-prince Svyatoslav by Malusha, the housekeeper of his grandmother Olga; the prince taunted as “a slave’s son”; the victor of the fratricidal war of 980 who killed his brother Yaropolk and seized sole rule of Kyiv; the libertine of eight hundred concubines whom the chronicler likens to Solomon; the pagan who raised idols on the hill above the city and let his people sacrifice their sons and daughters to them. This portrait is the deliberate dark ground against which the Chronicle sets the conversion of 988 — and it must be read as portrait, drawn by Christian monks a century later, as much as as history.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles)

A Portrait Before It Is a Biography

Almost everything narrated of the young Vladimir comes from one source: the Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let, the Tale of Bygone Years), compiled in Kyiv around 1113, more than a century after the events it describes (trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, 1953; on the source itself see The Sources). The chronicler is a Christian monk writing of a Christian realm, and his Vladimir is built to a purpose. The pagan prince is drawn as dark as the materials allow — fratricide, idolatry, human sacrifice, eight hundred concubines — precisely so that the convert who emerges in 988 may shine the brighter. This is the oldest literary logic of the conversion narrative, the pattern of Augustine’s Confessions and of the Constantine legend: the deeper the sin, the greater the grace. The historian must therefore read the pagan Vladimir as a portrait first and a biography second. What follows is what the Chronicle attests, reported as such.

Son of Svyatoslav and a Bondwoman

Vladimir was a son of Svyatoslav I (reigned c. 945–972), the last great pagan warrior-prince of the Rurikid house, the conqueror who broke the Khazars and campaigned to the Danube, and a grandson of St. Olga of Kiev, the first Christian ruler of the dynasty (see St. Olga of Kiev). But Vladimir’s mother set him apart from his brothers. The Chronicle records, under the entry where Novgorod asks Svyatoslav for a prince of its own, that “Vladimir was son of Malusha, stewardess of Olga and sister of Dobrynya. Their father was Malk of Lyubech, and Dobrynya was thus Vladimir’s uncle” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 970). Malusha was Olga’s klyuchnitsa — her housekeeper or steward, a servant of the household — and the tradition reckoned Vladimir, accordingly, the son of a bondwoman. Her brother Dobrynya, Vladimir’s maternal uncle, would be the great fixer of his early career, the man set over Novgorod and later remembered as the agent of Novgorod’s forced baptism (see Christianizing the Land).

The stain of low birth surfaces sharply in the most famous episode of Vladimir’s youth. Seeking the hand of Rogned (Rogneda), daughter of Rogvolod, the Varangian prince of Polotsk, Vladimir is refused in words the Chronicle preserves: “‘I will not,’ she replied, ‘draw off the boots of a slave’s son, but I want Yaropolk instead’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 978–980). The insult — robichich, “son of a slave-woman” — turns on the wedding-night custom by which the bride drew off the groom’s boots in token of submission; Rogned would not perform the gesture of a servant for a servant’s son. Vladimir’s answer was war.

The Fratricidal War of 980

Svyatoslav had divided his realm among three sons: Yaropolk in Kyiv, Oleg in the land of the Drevlians, and Vladimir, the youngest, in Novgorod. After Svyatoslav’s death (killed by the Pechenegs at the Dnieper rapids in 972), the brothers fell to war. Yaropolk made war on Oleg and killed him; and Vladimir, hearing of it, “fled beyond the sea” to the Varangians — to Scandinavia — to gather a force (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 977). He returned with Varangian allies, drove out Yaropolk’s governor in Novgorod, and marched south.

The Chronicle’s narrative of the conquest is brutal and concrete. Vladimir “attacked Polotsk, killed Rogvolod and his two sons,” took the daughter who had scorned him — Rogned — by force, and then “proceeded against Yaropolk” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 980). At Kyiv he prevailed not by battle but by treachery: through the betrayal of Yaropolk’s own general Blud, Yaropolk was lured to a parley, and “when he entered the door, two Varangians stabbed him in the breast with their swords, while Blud shut the doors… Thus Yaropolk was slain” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 980). Vladimir took Yaropolk’s widow, a Greek woman and former nun, already pregnant; the child she bore was Svyatopolk, whom the Chronicle calls the son “of two fathers” — and who would grow up to murder his half-brothers Boris and Gleb (see Boris and Gleb). The fratricide at the root of the dynasty’s Christian story is thus, in the Chronicle’s telling, Vladimir’s own.

Some of this is plausible history — the dynastic war among Svyatoslav’s sons is the kind of event a tradition would remember — and some is patterned narrative; the treacherous general and the doomed parley are the stock furniture of chronicle. The collection reports the episode as the Chronicle gives it, without certifying its detail. What is historically secure is the outcome: by about 980 Vladimir reigned alone in Kyiv as Grand Prince of all the Rus’.

Eight Hundred Concubines: The Solomon Comparison

Having taken Kyiv, the Chronicle’s Vladimir is a figure of titanic appetite. After listing his lawful wives and their children — Rogned and her four sons; the Greek widow and Svyatopolk; a Czech woman; a Bulgarian woman, mother of Boris and Gleb — the chronicler adds: “He had three hundred concubines at Vyshgorod, three hundred at Belgorod, and two hundred at Berestovo… He was insatiable in vice… for he was a libertine like Solomon. For it is said that Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. He was wise, yet in the end he came to ruin. But Vladimir, though at first deluded, eventually found salvation” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 980).

The number — eight hundred concubines — is not a census figure; it is a theological one. The chronicler reaches at once for Solomon (1 Kings 11), and the comparison gives the game away: Vladimir’s vices are being sized to a biblical type, the wise king undone by women, so that his conversion can be read as the reverse of Solomon’s fall — the libertine who, unlike Solomon, “eventually found salvation.” Per the repository methodology §3.5, the figure is reported as what the Chronicle attests within an explicitly typological frame, not as a demographic fact. The German chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg, writing closer to the events, independently remembered Vladimir as a fornicator maximus before his marriage and baptism (Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon VII.72) — so a reputation for sexual excess is not the Chronicle’s invention alone; but the precise tally belongs to the chronicler’s art.

The Idols on the Hill

The Chronicle’s pagan Vladimir was not merely a sinner; he was, for a moment, the patron of a pagan state cult. Reigning alone in Kyiv, “he set up idols on the hills outside the castle with the hall: one of Perun, made of wood with a head of silver and a mustache of gold, and others of Khors, Dazh’bog, Stribog, Simar’gl, and Mokosh’. The people sacrificed to them, calling them gods” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 980). His uncle Dobrynya, set over Novgorod, “set up an idol beside the river Volkhov,” and the Novgorodians sacrificed to it as to a god.

Modern scholarship reads this not as undirected superstition but as a deliberate act of state. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard interpret Vladimir’s pantheon as an attempt to forge a unitary cult for a heterogeneous realm — to bind a population of Slavs, Scandinavians, Finnic peoples, and steppe nomads around a single official religion centered on Perun, the thunder-god of the warrior elite (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996, the chapter “U-Turns and Conversion”). On this reading the pagan reform of 980 and the Christian “U-turn” of 988 are two attempts at the same problem: the consolidation of a young, diverse state under one faith. The first attempt failed; the second succeeded, and would last a thousand years.

The Varangian Martyrs of 983

The darkest of the Chronicle’s pagan scenes is the human sacrifice of 983. After Vladimir’s victory over the Yatvingians, the elders and boyars cast lots “for a youth and a maiden” to be sacrificed, and the lot fell on the son of a Christian Varangian who had immigrated from Greece. The father refused to surrender his son: “‘These are not gods, but only idols of wood. Today it is, and tomorrow it will rot away… I will not give up my son to devils’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 983). When the mob came, he answered from the porch that if these were truly gods, let them send one of their number to take the boy. The crowd tore down the structure beneath father and son and killed them both, “and no one knows where they are buried.”

The Chronicle names neither man. Later hagiographic tradition gave them names — Theodore and John, the Varangian Martyrs of Kyiv, honored as the protomartyrs of Rus’ (commemorated 12 July) — but those names come from the menologion tradition, not from the Primary Chronicle itself, and the collection flags the distinction per methodology §3.5. What the Chronicle gives is the scene, and its meaning within the larger story: the last sacrifice of the old gods, on the very hill where Vladimir would one day build a church to St. Basil, the patron of his own baptism (see Building the Church).

History and Chronicle-Portrait

What, then, can be held as history? The bare frame is secure: Vladimir was a son of Svyatoslav, of irregular birth on his mother’s side; he won sole rule of Kyiv around 980 after a war among Svyatoslav’s sons; he ruled as a pagan for the better part of a decade; and he undertook, before 988, some kind of pagan religious consolidation. These facts have the shape of remembered dynastic history and find partial echo in independent witnesses. The texture — the exact tally of concubines, the words of Rogned and of Blud, the speeches at the sacrifice of 983 — is the chronicler’s portrait, shaped by Scripture and by the demands of a conversion narrative that needed a great sinner to make a great saint. The collection keeps the two apart: the frame reported as probable history, the texture reported as what the Chronicle attests. The pagan prince of these pages is, above all, the man the converted Vladimir was no longer — the dark against which the Chronicle, and the tradition after it, would measure the light.

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Entries s.a. 970 (Malusha, Dobrynya, Malk of Lyubech), 977 (flight beyond the sea), 978–980 (Rogned, the robichich reproach, Polotsk), 980 (the war, Blud, Yaropolk’s death, the concubines and Solomon, the idols), 983 (the Varangian martyrs).
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the pagan pantheon of 980 as a unitary state cult and the “U-turn” of 988.
Thietmar of Merseburg. Chronicon, Book VII. Trans. David A. Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, Manchester University Press, 2001. The contemporary German witness to Vladimir as fornicator maximus before his conversion.
Holy Great Prince Vladimir, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 15. For the parentage and the traditional outline of the pagan years.
On the Varangian protomartyrs Theodore and John (12 July), the names of which derive from later menologion tradition rather than the Primary Chronicle: OrthoChristian.com and the OCA Lives of the Saints.