Korsun and Anna

The historical core of Vladimir’s conversion: the siege of the Byzantine Crimean city of Cherson (Korsun); the alliance with the Emperor Basil II, fighting for his throne against the rebel Bardas Phokas, sealed by the dispatch of six thousand Rus’ warriors who became the nucleus of the Varangian Guard; and the marriage to Anna, the porphyrogenita sister of the emperor — a born-in-the-purple princess whose marriage to a “barbarian” was unprecedented and on whose hand baptism was made the condition. This file gives the Chronicle’s narrative, the crucial independent corroboration of Yahya of Antioch, and the genuinely disputed question of when and where Vladimir was baptized.

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

The Historical Hinge

Unlike the testing of the faiths, the Korsun campaign and the Anna marriage stand on partly firm historical ground. They are corroborated, in their essentials, by sources entirely independent of the Rus’ tradition — above all the Arab Christian chronicler Yahya of Antioch, but also the Byzantine and Armenian historians of Basil II’s reign. Here the legend and the documented event run closest together. The collection therefore reports both the Chronicle’s vivid narrative, pinned to it per methodology §3.5, and the external reconstruction that lets us see what actually happened.

The Byzantine Crisis and the Alliance

The setting is one of the great crises of the Byzantine tenth century. In 987 two successive military revolts — first that of Bardas Skleros, then, more dangerously, that of Bardas Phokas the Younger, who proclaimed himself emperor on 14 September 987 — brought the young Emperor Basil II to the edge of ruin, with the rebel armies threatening Constantinople itself. In his extremity Basil turned to the Rus’. The agreement reached, no later than the autumn of 988, was extraordinary: Vladimir would send a corps of warriors to fight for Basil, and in exchange would receive the hand of the emperor’s own sister, the princess Anna — on the condition that he be baptized and bring his people to the Christian faith.

Vladimir duly sent a force of six thousand Rus’ and Varangian warriors. With their help Basil crushed the rebels — at Chrysopolis late in 988 and decisively at Abydos on 13 April 989, where Phokas himself died. These six thousand did not return; they became the foundation of the famous Varangian Guard, the corps of Scandinavian and Rus’ axemen who would serve as the emperors’ household soldiers for two centuries. The conversion of Rus’ and the most celebrated military institution of medieval Byzantium thus spring from a single bargain.

The Marriage of a Porphyrogenita

The astonishing element of the deal was the bride. Anna (born 13 March 963) was a porphyrogenita — “born in the purple,” a princess born to a reigning emperor in the purple birth-chamber of the palace, and thus of the very highest rank the Byzantine world knew. Such princesses were, by the explicit rule of Byzantine statecraft, not given to foreigners. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Anna’s own grandfather, had laid down in his De Administrando Imperio the injunction that his successors should never marry born-in-the-purple princesses to barbarian rulers, under any circumstances. Twenty years earlier the request for a porphyrogenita to wed the German emperor Otto II had been refused, and the non-purple-born Theophano sent in her place. That Anna was now given to the prince of Kyiv measures both Basil’s desperation and the weight Vladimir was able to bring to bear.

The historian Dimitri Obolensky put the point in its classic form: the Byzantine matrimonial customs “forbade marriages between members of the imperial family, more especially princesses ‘born in the purple,’ and barbarian rulers. Anna, Vladimir’s bride, was such a princess. Basil II must have been in desperate straits, and Vladimir of Kiev able to exert the strongest pressure, for the royal family of Kiev to be accorded this signal honour, which twenty years earlier had been refused to the German emperor” (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971). The marriage raised the house of Kyiv, at a stroke, into the first rank of Christian dynasties.

The Chronicle’s Siege Narrative

The Primary Chronicle tells the story in its own dramatic key, placing the whole sequence under the year 988. Vladimir, it says, “marched with an armed force against Kherson, a Greek city, and the people of Kherson barricaded themselves therein” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988). The siege drags; Vladimir builds an earthwork against the wall, which the defenders undermine. The deadlock is broken by treachery from within: a man of the city — named Anastasius (Anastasius of Cherson, later abbot of the Tithe Church in Kyiv) — shoots an arrow into the Rus’ camp bearing a message: “There are springs behind thee to the east, from which water flows in pipes. Dig down and cut them off” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988). Vladimir, the Chronicle says, “raised his eyes to heaven and vowed that if this hope was realized, he would be baptized.” The conduits were cut, the city died of thirst, and Cherson fell.

Holding the city, Vladimir then sent to the emperors Basil and Constantine demanding their sister, threatening: “Unless you give her to me to wife, I shall deal with your own city as I have with Kherson” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988). The emperors’ reply made baptism the condition: “It is not meet for Christians to give in marriage to pagans. If you are baptized, you shall have her to wife, inherit the kingdom of God, and be our companion in the faith” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988). Anna, in the Chronicle’s telling, is sent weeping, lamenting as if given “into captivity,” but is persuaded that she may turn the Rus’ to Christianity.

Yahya of Antioch: The Independent Witness

The crucial check on all this comes from Yahya of Antioch, the eleventh-century Melkite chronicler whose Annals are independent of the Rus’ tradition. Yahya reports the political core plainly: Basil II, his situation grave before the rebel Phokas, appealed to the king of the Rus’; an agreement was reached by which the emperor gave his sister in marriage on condition that the Rus’ king and his people be baptized; Vladimir was baptized and baptized the people of his land, with bishops sent for the purpose; and a Rus’ military force was dispatched that, joined to the imperial army, defeated Phokas (Yahya of Antioch, Annals, ed. and trans. Rosen and Vasiliev, Patrologia Orientalis 23). Yahya’s account corroborates exactly the framework the Chronicle dresses in the romance of arrow and siege — alliance, marriage-for-baptism, six thousand troops — and his chronology, anchored to datable events of Basil’s war (Chrysopolis, Abydos in April 989, the comet and earthquake of 989), is what lets historians reconstruct the sequence the Chronicle blurs.

The Baptismal Name

At his baptism Vladimir took the Christian name Basil (Vasiliy), after his new godfather and brother-in-law, the Emperor Basil II (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988; OCA, Lives of the Saints, July 15). The name binds the convert to the imperial house and to the great Cappadocian Father whose patronage it also invoked; the first church Vladimir raised on his return to Kyiv would be dedicated to St. Basil (see Building the Church).

The Disputed Date and Place of the Baptism

Where the sources diverge most sharply is on when and where Vladimir was actually baptized — and the Chronicle itself confesses the confusion. Its narrative places the baptism at Cherson, in the Church of St. Basil, with the famous healing of his blindness: Vladimir, afflicted in the eyes and seeing nothing, is told that baptism will heal him; “as the Bishop laid his hand upon him, he straightway received his sight” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988). But the chronicler immediately concedes that others tell it otherwise: “Those who do not know the truth say he was baptized in Kiev, while others assert this event took place in Vasilev, while still others mention other places” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988). The uncertainty is in the source itself.

Modern scholarship has divided sharply on how to resolve the sequence, and the question is genuinely open:

[Disputed: The date and place of Vladimir’s baptism are unresolved. (1) The traditional Korsun account (the Primary Chronicle‘s main narrative) places the baptism at Cherson in 988/989, after and as a result of the siege, with the campaign undertaken to obtain Anna. (2) The Vasilev/early-baptism tradition — represented by Jacob the Monk (Memorial and Encomium, 11th c.), who states Vladimir was already a Christian when he took Korsun and dates the baptism to 987, before the campaign — underlies the Chronicle’s own “Vasilev” variant. (3) Andrzej Poppe (“The Political Background to the Baptism of Rus’,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30, 1976) argues the revisionist reconstruction: the alliance was settled in 987, Vladimir was baptized first at Kyiv early in 988, the Rus’ corps helped Basil win at Abydos (April 989), and Cherson was taken in 989 as Basil’s ally (or to pressure Basil into honoring the marriage after Phokas’s defeat) — inverting the Chronicle’s causation. (4) Dimitri Obolensky (“Cherson and the Conversion of Rus’: an Anti-Revisionist View,” BMGS 13, 1989) defends the traditional sequence: the siege ran later (summer 989 into 990), after Vladimir learned Phokas was dead and Basil was stalling on sending Anna, with Cherson taken as leverage to force delivery of the bride. (5) Franklin & Shepard (The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996) decline to adjudicate Poppe versus Obolensky but stress the baptism was Vladimir’s own initiative. The securely datable points are: the alliance and the 6,000 troops, 987/988; Chrysopolis, late 988; Abydos, 13 April 989; Cherson most probably taken in 989. Whether the baptism preceded the siege (Poppe, Jacob the Monk) or followed it (the Chronicle’s main narrative, Obolensky) is not settled.]

For the purposes of veneration and of the round date the tradition keeps, 988 stands as the year of the conversion of Vladimir and of Rus’. The collection reports the scholarly debate as live and names the positions, per methodology §3, rather than choosing among them.

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. 988 (the siege of Cherson; Anastasius and the arrow; the vow; the demand for Anna; the marriage condition; Anna’s reluctance; the healing of blindness and baptism in the Church of St. Basil; the variant-places note; the baptismal name Basil).
Yahya of Antioch. Annals. Ed. and trans. V. R. Rosen and A. A. Vasiliev, Patrologia Orientalis 23. The independent corroboration of the alliance, the marriage-on-condition-of-baptism, the baptism of the Rus’, and the dispatch of troops against Phokas.
Poppe, Andrzej. “The Political Background to the Baptism of Rus’: Byzantine-Russian Relations between 986–89.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30 (1976): 195–244. The revisionist chronology (baptism at Kyiv early 988; Cherson 989).
Obolensky, Dimitri. “Cherson and the Conversion of Rus’: an Anti-Revisionist View.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 13 (1989): 244–256. The defense of the traditional Cherson sequence; and The Byzantine Commonwealth (1971) on the porphyrogenita marriage.
Jacob the Monk (Iakov Mnikh). Memorial and Encomium of Prince Vladimir, 11th c. The baptism dated to 987 at Vasilev, before the Korsun campaign.
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the alliance, the 6,000 troops, and the baptism as Vladimir’s own initiative.
Holy Great Prince Vladimir, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 15. For the baptismal name and the traditional account.