Section 03: The Baptism of Vladimir
The section treating Vladimir’s own conversion — the personal baptism that preceded the baptism of his people. At its center stands the famous and tangled sequence of the Korsun campaign and the imperial marriage: Vladimir’s siege of the Byzantine city of Cherson in the Crimea; the deal by which the Emperor Basil II, fighting for his throne, gave his born-in-the-purple sister Anna in marriage on condition of Vladimir’s baptism; and Vladimir’s reception of the faith, taking the name Basil, around 988–989. The exact date and place of that baptism are genuinely disputed, and the section sets out the named scholarly positions.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles)
Contents
| File | Topic |
|---|---|
| Korsun and Anna | The siege of Cherson (Korsun) and the Chronicle’s arrow-and-water-pipes narrative; the alliance with Basil II against Bardas Phokas and the 6,000 Rus’ who became the Varangian Guard; the marriage to the porphyrogenita Anna and its unprecedented character; Yahya of Antioch’s corroboration; the baptismal name Basil; the disputed date and place of the baptism, with named scholarly positions (Poppe, Obolensky, Franklin & Shepard) |
| The Conversion of a Warlord | The meaning of the personal conversion: from fornicator maximus to Christian prince; the healing-of-blindness motif as the Chronicle’s image of spiritual sight; the genuineness and the political logic of the change; the warlord remade |
How to Use
- Read Korsun and Anna for the campaign, the marriage, the external corroboration, and the dating debate — the historical core of the conversion.
- Read The Conversion of a Warlord for the meaning of the change in Vladimir himself, the hinge between the pagan prince of Section 01 and the transformed prince of Section 05.
A Note on Sources
The Korsun campaign and the Anna marriage are, unlike the testing of the faiths, partly corroborated by independent sources — above all the Arab Christian chronicler Yahya of Antioch, who confirms the alliance, the marriage-on-condition-of-baptism, and the dispatch of Rus’ troops. The date and place of Vladimir’s baptism, however, the sources do not agree on; following methodology §3, that disagreement is presented as a structured [Disputed: ...] note naming the positions, not resolved by fiat. The Chronicle’s miraculous details — the arrow, the healing of blindness — are pinned to the Chronicle per §3.5.
Cross-References
- For the legend that leads into this section, see Section 02: The Investigation of the Faiths.
- For the baptism of Vladimir’s people that followed his own, see Section 04: The Baptism of Rus’.
- For the Byzantine mother church, see Orthodoxy: The Patriarchate of Constantinople.