Section 02: The Investigation of the Faiths

The section treating the most famous episode in the whole story of the conversion of Rus’: the Primary Chronicle’s tale of how Vladimir, seeking a new faith, received and examined the religions of his neighbors — the Volga Bulgar Muslims, the Khazar Jews, the German Latins, and the Greeks — and then sent envoys to observe each at worship, who returned overwhelmed by the Byzantine liturgy at Hagia Sophia (“we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth”). This section reports the tale as the Chronicle gives it, names its quotations exactly, and sets it within the modern scholarly judgment that the episode is a literary composition rather than a record of events — and asks what, historically, drew Vladimir to Byzantium.

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

Contents

File Topic
The Testing of the Religions The Chronicle’s account (entries 986–987): the four embassies and Vladimir’s replies (“Drinking is the joy of the Rus’”); the ten envoys sent to observe worship among the Bulgars, the Germans, and the Greeks; the Hagia Sophia scene and “heaven or on earth”; the boyars’ invocation of Olga; the legendary and literary character of the narrative per the methodology and the modern consensus (Ostrowski, Shepard)
Why Byzantium The historical forces behind the choice the legend dramatizes: geography and the Dnieper trade route; the Byzantine cultural magnetism (Obolensky’s Commonwealth); Olga’s precedent; the Cyrillo-Methodian Slavonic inheritance already arriving through Bulgaria; the dynastic prize of an imperial marriage; the political logic that Franklin & Shepard set against the Chronicle’s romance

How to Use

  • Read The Testing of the Religions for the tale itself and the source-critical handling of it — this is the flagship treatment of the famous Chronicle episode under methodology §3.5.
  • Read Why Byzantium for the historical reconstruction of what actually drew the Rus’ toward Constantinople rather than Rome, Baghdad, or the Khazar steppe.

A Note on Sources

The testing of the faiths is the clearest case in the whole collection of the methodology’s §3.5 discipline. It is one of the best-loved passages of medieval Slavic literature and one of the least likely to be a record of events. This section reports the narrative fully and in the Chronicle’s own words, names its quotations to their year-entries, and states plainly the modern scholarly consensus — that it is a literary composition assembled from distinct traditions and conversion-story commonplaces — without either dismissing the tale or certifying it as history.

Cross-References