Why Byzantium

The historical reconstruction behind the choice that the Primary Chronicle dramatizes as the testing of the faiths. Beneath the legend lie real forces: the geography of the Dnieper trade route that bound Kyiv to Constantinople; the overwhelming cultural and political magnetism of Byzantium, the richest and most prestigious civilization in the Rus’ world; the precedent of Vladimir’s grandmother Olga; the Church Slavonic liturgy and letters already arriving through Bulgaria as the Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance; and the unrepeatable dynastic prize of marriage into the imperial house. This file sets the political logic, as Franklin & Shepard and Obolensky reconstruct it, beside the Chronicle’s romance.

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

The Question the Legend Answers

The testing of the faiths (see The Testing of the Religions) is the Chronicle’s answer, in the form of a legend, to a genuine historical question: why did the Rus’ become Byzantine Christians — Greek and not Latin, Christian and not Muslim or Jewish? The choice was not foreordained. Kyiv sat at a crossroads where four religious worlds met: the Latin Christianity of the German empire and Poland to the west; Islam, the faith of the Volga Bulgars and of the vast Abbasid trading world to the east and south; the Judaism of the Khazar elite who had ruled the steppe; and the Greek Christianity of Byzantium to the south, beyond the Black Sea. The Chronicle reduces this real array of options to a contest of embassies. Modern scholarship reconstructs the forces that actually weighted the scales toward Constantinople.

Geography: The Road to the Greeks

The most basic force was geography. Kyiv’s wealth and very existence rested on the great river-road the Chronicle itself names “the route from the Varangians to the Greeks” — the Dnieper artery that carried Scandinavian and Rus’ merchants, with their furs, slaves, wax, and honey, south past the rapids to the Black Sea and on to Constantinople, the greatest market in the Christian world. For a century before Vladimir, the relationship between Kyiv and Byzantium had been the defining axis of Rus’ foreign affairs: the raids of Oleg and Igor on Constantinople, the trade treaties of 911 and 944, the service of Rus’ warriors in imperial armies. Constantinople — Tsar’grad, the “imperial city,” in the Rus’ tongue — was the pole toward which the whole Rus’ economy and imagination already pointed. The faith of the Greeks came down the same river as their silks and their gold. Franklin and Shepard stress that the conversion cannot be understood apart from this prior, deepening entanglement: Byzantium was already, for the Rus’, the model of wealth, order, and prestige (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996).

The Byzantine Commonwealth

To this Dimitri Obolensky added the broader cultural frame. Byzantium in the tenth century was the richest, most sophisticated, and most prestigious civilization in the Rus’ world — heir of Rome, possessor of the most magnificent ceremonial and the most developed Christian theology and law in Europe. To enter its religious orbit was to enter what Obolensky called the Byzantine Commonwealth: a family of states — Bulgaria, Serbia, Georgia, and now Rus’ — that shared Byzantine Christianity, Byzantine liturgy, Byzantine art and law, and acknowledged, in varying degrees, the spiritual primacy of Constantinople and the symbolic headship of the emperor over the Christian world (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453, 1971). For a young, expanding state seeking to consolidate itself, membership in this commonwealth offered everything Vladimir’s failed pagan reform of 980 had reached for — a unifying high culture and a sacral legitimation of rule — and far more besides. The conversion was, among other things, the most ambitious act of state-building of his reign.

Olga’s Precedent

Vladimir was not breaking new ground but completing a path already opened within his own house. His grandmother St. Olga had been baptized a Christian — by the tradition’s account, at Constantinople itself, around the middle of the tenth century — and had ruled as a Christian over a still-pagan realm (see St. Olga of Kiev). Her attempt to convert her son Svyatoslav, Vladimir’s father, had failed; the warrior-prince would not take a faith his druzhina would mock. But Olga’s Christianity remained a living memory at the Kyivan court, and the Chronicle makes her the clinching argument of the boyars: the Greek faith cannot be evil, for the wisest of the dynasty had embraced it (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 987). The Byzantine option was, uniquely among the four, already domesticated — already the faith of a Rus’ ruler the Rus’ venerated.

The Cyrillo-Methodian Inheritance

A further, decisive advantage of Byzantine Christianity was that it could be received in a Slavic tongue. Unlike the Latin Church, which bound its worship to Latin, the Byzantine mission had — through the ninth-century work of Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples — created a Slavonic liturgy, a Slavonic Scripture, and the alphabet to carry them. By Vladimir’s day this Church Slavonic literature was flourishing in the newly Christian Bulgaria, just across the Byzantine frontier, and it was from Bulgaria above all that the books, the liturgical texts, and much of the early clergy of the Rus’ Church would come (see The Church of Rus). The faith Vladimir adopted thus arrived not as an alien Latin import but in a Slavic language his people could understand — a fact that shaped the entire subsequent character of Rus’ Christianity, with its native-language liturgy and its rich vernacular literature. This Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance is one of the deepest reasons the Greek choice took root as the Latin choice, in the same period, was failing among the western Slavs’ eastern neighbors.

The Dynastic Prize

Finally there was the prize that no other faith could offer: marriage into the imperial house itself. In 987 the Emperor Basil II, his throne shaken by the great revolt of Bardas Phokas, found himself in need of Rus’ troops; and the price Vladimir was able to extract was the hand of Basil’s own sister, the porphyrogenita Anna — a princess “born in the purple,” whose marriage to a foreign ruler was, by the standing rule of the Byzantine court, all but unthinkable (see Korsun and Anna). No German emperor had been granted such a bride. To marry a born-in-the-purple Byzantine princess was to be raised, at a stroke, into the first rank of Christian sovereigns — a dynastic and ideological coup that bound the house of Kyiv to the imperial line of Constantinople. The marriage was conditioned on baptism; and so the dynastic prize and the religious choice became, in the events of 988, a single act.

The Romance and the Reckoning

The Roads Not Taken

It sharpens the question to consider why the other three faiths of the testing-of-faiths narrative did not prevail — for each represented a real alternative, and each had been the choice of one of Rus’ neighbors. Islam was the faith of the Volga Bulgars, with whom the Rus’ traded, and of the vast and wealthy Abbasid world to the south; a Rus’ turn to Islam was not unthinkable, and the Volga Bulgars themselves had taken exactly that road. But Islam offered no marriage into an empire on Kyiv’s doorstep, came with prohibitions (on wine above all) that the Chronicle’s Vladimir found incompatible with Rus’ life, and was the faith of a world reached only by long and difficult routes. Judaism was the faith of the Khazar ruling elite who had dominated the steppe in the previous century — but the Khazar power was broken (Vladimir’s own father Svyatoslav had shattered it), and a faith without a state behind it, whose adherents the medieval mind read as scattered by divine judgment, offered nothing to a rising power. Latin Christianity was the live and serious alternative: the German empire and Poland lay to the west, and the Latin Church was actively missionizing the western Slavs in exactly this period. Had geography and dynasty pointed west rather than south, Rus’ might have become a Latin Christian land, as Poland did. But the Latin Church bound its worship to Latin, offered no imperial bride to compare with Anna, and lay across less-travelled roads than the great Dnieper artery to Constantinople. Each of the roads not taken was a real road; that Byzantium prevailed was overdetermined, but it was not inevitable, and the weighing of the alternatives — which the testing-of-faiths legend dramatizes and the historians reconstruct — is a real weighing of options that a real ruler faced.

The Romance and the Reckoning

The Chronicle’s legend and the historians’ reconstruction are not rivals so much as two registers of the same event. The Chronicle says the Rus’ chose Byzantium because its worship was heaven on earth; the historians say they chose it because of the river, the wealth, the grandmother, the books, and the bride. Both are true, and the tradition has never found them in contradiction. Vladimir was a shrewd ruler making the most consequential strategic decision of his reign, and he was also — in the conviction of the Church that venerates him — a man drawn by grace toward the true faith through the very things that made it advantageous. Franklin and Shepard are careful to insist that the baptism was Vladimir’s own initiative, not an act forced or stage-managed by Basil II (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996). The prince who chose Byzantium chose it freely, for reasons at once worldly and, the Church holds, providential. Why Byzantium? Because everything — geography, wealth, kinship, language, and the imperial purple — pointed that way; and because, the tradition adds, God meant the Rus’ to walk that road.

See Also

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. Entry s.a. 987 (Olga as the clinching argument); the “route from the Varangians to the Greeks” in the introductory geography.
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the Dnieper trade axis, the political logic of the conversion, and the baptism as Vladimir’s own initiative.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. On Rus’ entry into the Byzantine cultural and religious orbit.
  • On the Cyrillo-Methodian Slavonic inheritance reaching Rus’ through Bulgaria: the standard accounts in Franklin and Shepard (above) and in Francis Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, Rutgers University Press, 1970.