The Testing of the Religions

The most celebrated episode in the conversion of Rus’: the Primary Chronicle‘s account (entries 986 and 987) of how Vladimir received embassies from four faiths — the Volga Bulgar Muslims, the Khazar Jews, the German Latins, and a Greek scholar — examined each, and then sent ten envoys to observe them at worship. The envoys found no joy among the Bulgars and no glory among the Germans, but in Hagia Sophia at Constantinople they “knew not whether they were in heaven or on earth.” This file gives the tale in the Chronicle’s own words, and reports the modern scholarly judgment — that it is a literary composition, not a record of events — without diminishing its meaning.

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

A Tale and Its Status

The “testing of the faiths” is the single most famous passage in the entire literature of the conversion of the Eastern Slavs. It is also, in the considered judgment of modern scholarship, the least likely to be a transcript of events. The collection therefore handles it under the repository methodology §3.5: the narrative is reported in full and in the Chronicle’s own words, pinned to its year-entries, and the scholarly consensus on its literary character is stated plainly — neither dismissing the tale nor certifying it as history. What the episode unquestionably is, is a profound theological statement, composed by Christian monks of Kyiv, about why the Rus’ embraced the Byzantine rite: not by argument won but by beauty seen.

The Four Embassies (Entry 986)

The Chronicle frames the year 986 as the year the faiths came to Vladimir. Four embassies arrive, each pressing its religion; each is, in the narrative, an occasion for Vladimir to weigh and to reject, until only one remains.

The Volga Bulgars (Muslims). First came the Bulgars of the Volga, “of the Mohammedan faith,” urging Islam. The Chronicle has them describe a religion of circumcision, abstinence from pork and wine, and a paradise of sensual fulfillment after death. Vladimir, the narrative says, listened “gladly, for he was fond of women and indulgence,” but balked at the prohibitions. His reply has become one of the most quoted lines in Russian literature: “‘Drinking,’ said he, ‘is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 986). The line is at once comic and pointed: it caricatures the Rus’ as a hard-drinking warrior people and gives a homely, almost folkloric reason for rejecting Islam, beneath which lies the real point — that the Rus’ would not accept a faith felt as foreign to their whole way of life.

The Germans (Latins). “Then came the Germans, asserting that they were come as emissaries of the Pope” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 986). They preach a measured asceticism — “Fasting according to one’s strength.” Vladimir dismisses them in a single sentence that would prove fateful for the later confessional history of Rus’: “‘Depart hence; our fathers accepted no such principle’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 986). The Latin West is rejected not on doctrine but on ancestral non-acceptance — a striking detail in a text composed after the Latin and Greek churches had drifted apart.

The Khazar Jews. Next came Jews from among the Khazars — the steppe people whose ruling elite had famously adopted Judaism — professing “the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” with circumcision, abstinence from pork and hare, and the Sabbath. Vladimir’s reply turns on the loss of Jerusalem. Asked where their native land lay, they answered Jerusalem; asked where Jerusalem now was, they confessed: “‘God was angry at our forefathers, and scattered us among the gentiles on account of our sins. Our land was then given to the Christians’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 986). Vladimir’s response is sharp: “‘How can you hope to teach others while you yourselves are cast out and scattered abroad by the hand of God? 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?’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 986). The argument is a commonplace of medieval Christian polemic — the dispersion of the Jews read as divine rejection — and the collection reports it as the Chronicle’s, in its medieval frame, without endorsing its theology.

The Greek scholar. Last and longest comes the embassy of the Greeks, who send not a delegation but a single learned man, “a scholar.” His speech is by far the most extended in the episode: he denounces Islam (Vladimir, hearing of its practices, “spat upon the earth, saying, ‘This is a vile thing’”) and the Latins (who, he says, “have modified the faith”), and then unfolds the whole of sacred history from the Creation to the Last Judgment. He ends by showing Vladimir a great canvas depicting the Last Judgment — the saved on the right hand, the damned on the left. Vladimir, gazing at it, sighs: “‘Happy are they upon the right, but woe to those upon the left!’” The scholar urges him to be baptized; but Vladimir, still weighing, answers: “‘I shall wait yet a little longer’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 986). The image of the Last Judgment — beauty and terror made visible — foreshadows the climax to come, when it is again something seen, not argued, that decides the matter.

The Ten Envoys (Entry 987)

In the next year’s entry, Vladimir lays the embassies before his boyars and the city-elders. Their counsel is shrewd: “’…no man condemns his own possessions, but praises them instead. If you desire to make certain, you have servants at your disposal. Send them to inquire about the ritual of each and how he worships God’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 987). The faiths cannot be judged by their own advocates; they must be judged at worship. Vladimir chooses “good and wise men to the number of ten” and sends them first to the Bulgars, then to the Germans, and finally to the Greeks at Constantinople, where the Emperor and the Patriarch staged the Divine Liturgy in the great church of Hagia Sophia.

The envoys’ report on their return is the heart of the episode, and the collection gives it in full:

Among the Bulgars (no joy): “’…the Bulgar bows, sits down, looks hither and thither like one possessed, and there is no happiness among them, but instead only sorrow and a dreadful stench. Their religion is not good’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 987).
Among the Germans (no glory): “’…we saw them performing many ceremonies in their temples; but we beheld no glory there’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 987).
Among the Greeks, in Hagia Sophia: “‘Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and 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, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 987).

They conclude with a homely simile: “‘Every man, after tasting something sweet, is afterward unwilling to accept that which is bitter…’” Once one has known beauty, one cannot return to its absence. The decision is, in the narrative’s own terms, aesthetic and experiential before it is doctrinal: the faith is chosen because it was seen to be true.

Olga’s Example Clinches It

The boyars seal the matter with an argument from family and from the recent past: “‘If the Greek faith were evil, it would not have been adopted by your grandmother Olga who was wiser than all other men’” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 987). The invocation of St. Olga — Vladimir’s grandmother, the first Christian ruler of the dynasty, who had herself been baptized at Constantinople a generation before (see St. Olga of Kiev) — grounds the choice in the wisdom of the house’s own most venerated figure. The conversion of Rus’, in the Chronicle’s design, completes what Olga began. Vladimir asks where he should be baptized; the boyars leave the decision to him, and the narrative turns at once to the campaign against Korsun and the marriage to Anna (see Korsun and Anna).

The Legendary and Literary Character

The modern scholarly consensus is clear and worth stating directly: the testing of the faiths is not a record of events but an edifying literary composition assembled by the chronicler, even though the surrounding diplomatic frame — the Byzantine alliance and the marriage to Anna — has independent historical support (see The Sources). Several lines of evidence converge:

Donald Ostrowski argues that “the view that the account appearing in the [Primary Chronicle] is mostly a literary invention should now be accepted,” analyzing the episode as a compilation of four distinct stories drawing on five separate traditions, woven into one account with the seams still visible as internal contradictions; four of the five, he notes, parallel and borrow from conversion stories told of earlier rulers elsewhere — they are literary commonplaces (Ostrowski, “The Account of Volodimer’s Conversion in the Povest’ vremennykh let: A Chiasmus of Stories,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 28, 2006).
Jonathan Shepard observed the tell-tale narrative architecture: each embassy builds toward the punchline of conversion, but each time Vladimir hesitates and defers, whereupon the next story begins — a serial “hesitation-and-deferral” structure that is a hallmark of literary construction rather than reportage (Shepard, in the conversion scholarship; cf. Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996).
A. A. Shakhmatov had already shown the conversion narrative to be a layering of originally independent traditions — a “baptism in Kyiv” strand, the “testing” strand, and the separate “Korsun legend” — explaining the doublets and inconsistencies in the text (Shakhmatov, Razyskaniya, 1908; see The Sources).
The “choice of faiths” is, moreover, a recognized regional literary motif. The same competitive-disputation pattern appears in the Khazar conversion legends (the Hebrew Khazar Correspondence) and echoes in accounts of the Volga Bulgars’ own adoption of Islam. Vladimir’s disputation belongs to this East European “choice-of-faith” topos rather than to documentary history.

None of the envoys’ embassies, and no mission to Hagia Sophia, has any external attestation. Only the negotiation for Anna’s hand and the associated Byzantine alliance find independent corroboration in the sources of the time (above all Yahya of Antioch; see Korsun and Anna).

The Meaning Within the Frame

To call the episode a literary composition is not to call it false in the deepest sense, and the collection does not. The testing of the faiths is a theological statement of the highest order about why the Rus’ became Byzantine Christians: not because the Greek scholar out-argued the Bulgar, the Jew, and the Latin — though he does, in the narrative — but because the Byzantine liturgy was experienced as heaven on earth. The Orthodox tradition has always read the conversion of Rus’ in exactly this key: the faith was received through the beauty of worship, through the sense that in the Divine Liturgy “God dwells there among men.” Whatever the historical Vladimir’s calculations of trade, marriage, and power (see Why Byzantium), the Chronicle insists that the deepest reason was the one the envoys gave — that having once seen such beauty, “we cannot forget it.” That is reported here as what the tradition holds and the Chronicle attests: a true account of the meaning of the conversion, cast in the form of a legend.

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. 986 (the four embassies: the Bulgars and “drinking is the joy of the Russes”; the Germans; the Khazar Jews; the Greek scholar and the Last Judgment canvas) and 987 (the boyars’ counsel; the ten envoys; “no joy” among the Bulgars; “no glory” among the Germans; “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth”; the invocation of Olga).
Ostrowski, Donald. “The Account of Volodimer’s Conversion in the Povest’ vremennykh let: A Chiasmus of Stories.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 28, no. 1/4 (2006): 567–580. On the testing of the faiths as a literary compilation of five traditions.
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the narrative architecture of the conversion cycle and its didactic, literary character.
Shakhmatov, Aleksei A. Razyskaniya o drevneishikh russkikh letopisnykh svodakh. St. Petersburg, 1908. On the layered, composite origin of the conversion narrative.
On the “choice of faiths” as a regional literary motif shared with the Khazar conversion legends: the comparative folklore and Khazar-studies scholarship (e.g., O. Belova; V. Petrukhin, in The World of the Khazars, Brill, 2007).