WARRIORS AND CHRISTIANS
In the tenth century, Kiev Rus was hardly a state at all. Rather it was an assembly of tribes – Poliane/Rus around Kiev, Slovene in Novgorod, Krivichi and Viatichi in between, and several others – ruled from Kiev by a prince of the dynasty of Rurik and his warrior band or druzhina. The tribes paid tribute to the Kiev princes, who visited them occasionally for that purpose. Otherwise the vast majority of the people were peasant farmers scattered in the clearings of the forests and owning no master but the princes of Kiev. This was still a pagan world, as the legend of the death of Prince Oleg suggests. The story was that a wizard predicted that his horse would cause the prince’s death. Oleg put the horse out to pasture and forgot the prophecy, but years later he heard that the horse was dead and remembered it. Oleg went out to see the skeleton of the horse as it lay in a field. As he placed his foot on the skull to lament, a poisonous snake crawled out and bit him. Thus the prophecy was fulfilled.
These Kiev princes spent their time on wars that were essentially raiding expeditions against the Khazars, their successors the Pechenegs, and the richest prize of all, the Byzantines. In log boats they could follow the coast to Constantinople itself, and they raided it several times before they made treaties with the emperor regulating their status as traders. Princess Olga, the widow of Prince Igor, became a Christian about this time, perhaps after a journey to Constantinople. She ruled the land until about AD 962, but her son did not follow her beliefs. Sviatoslav, the son of Igor, was the last pure warrior chieftain in Rus; he spent his time fighting the Greeks and other rivals on the Danube and in the steppe. On his campaigns he slept on the ground with his saddle for a pillow and cut strips of raw horsemeat to roast for his food. He met his death in the steppe coming home from a raid on Byzantium, and the Pechenegs made a drinking cup of his skull.
His son Vladimir (AD 972–1015) at first followed in his father’s path. He too was a great warrior, and he maintained control over the Kiev lands by placing his many sons to rule over distant territories. He tried to organize their pagan beliefs and set up a temple in Kiev to Perun, the god of thunder, and other deities. Soon, however, he turned to the religion of his grandmother Olga, the Christianity of Constantinople. The chronicle records several stories of his conversion, probably none of them true, but they remain a part of Russian conceptions of the past to this day. One story was that the decision grew out of a raid on the Byzantine town of Chersonesus in the Crimea. The raid ended in a compromise, according to which the Greeks kept their town but Vladimir married a Byzantine princess and became a Christian. Another story was that his neighbors proposed that he adopt their religion. First a Muslim came from Volga Bulgaria and seemed very persuasive until Vladimir learned of the prohibition on alcoholic drinks. “The joy of Rus is drinking,” he told the Bulgarian, and sent him away. Then Vladimir turned to Rome, and the rituals and fasts seemed attractive but the objection was that the ancestors of the Rus had rejected Latin Christianity. Then a Khazar Jew came, but Judaism failed because of the exile of the Jews, clearly a sign of God’s wrath. Then a Greek “philosopher” came and explained Christianity, giving a brief account of the Old and New Testaments, emphasizing the fall and redemption of man. He was very convincing, but the prince wanted final proof and sent a delegation to Bulgaria, Rome, and Constantinople. The services of the Muslims and Latins failed to win approval, for they lacked beauty. Then the Rus went to Constantinople and attended the liturgy in Saint Sophia, the great cathedral built by Justinian, and reported that they were so impressed that they did not know if they were on earth or in heaven. The choice was for Christianity as understood in Byzantium, and it determined the place of Kiev Rus, and later of Russia, in European culture for centuries.
Vladimir ordered the people of Kiev to be baptized in the river Dniepr, but the new religion caught on slowly outside the major centers. Vladimir himself put away his concubines and married the Byzantine princess, but in many of his values he remained part of the pagan world of the warrior prince. Once, several years after the conversion (AD 996), his warriors began to complain to him that at banquets they had to eat with wooden spoons, not with silver. The prince replied, “it is not for me to get warriors with silver and gold, I shall get silver and gold with my warriors, as my father and his father did” – hardly a sentiment for a Christian ruler. In and around the greater towns, however, Christianity gradually made its way. The Greek clergy in Constantinople supplied the heads of the new church, the metropolitans of Kiev, but other bishops were mostly natives. The founding of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves in the 1050s, dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin, provided Rus with its first monastery, the key institution for Byzantine Christianity. The monastery produced not only its own saints in its founders Antonii and Feodosii but also the bishops for the eparchies outside of Kiev. The Caves Monastery and the others that soon arose around Kiev and Novgorod also provided the libraries and writing skills that produced the Primary Chronicle and other records, but of course their main role was spiritual. It was the monks who provided the charisma to spread a new religion.
The new religion had to be made to fit a society very different from the sophisticated urban world of Byzantium. The introduction of Christianity did not bring with it other aspects of Byzantine civilization, for the tradition of the eastern churches was one of a vernacular liturgy. In Kiev Rus the mass was not in Greek but in a ninth-century Bulgarian dialect scholars call Old or Church Slavic. At that time the Slavic languages were all very similar to one another, so this was a readily comprehensible language in Kiev. The use of Church Slavic implied that the liturgy, the scriptures, and other holy books had to be translated into Slavic, an arduous task but one that removed the need to learn Greek for all but a few learned monks. Much Christian literature and all of the secular literature of Byzantium remained unknown in Kiev Rus and later societies. The Russians would discover Greek antiquity in the eighteenth century from the West.
The relations of Rome and Constantinople in these early centuries were complicated. The famous mutual anathema of the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople of 1054 was not the decisive break that it seemed to later historians, and the people of Rus were barely aware of it. One of Kiev’s Greek metropolitans did write a short tract denouncing the Latins, but native writers did not join him and the Primary Chronicle is silent on the events. It was only with the Fourth Crusade, the destruction and conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the crusading armies from Western Europe in 1204, that the people of Rus took notice of the division and where their loyalties lay. The Rus chroniclers covered this event in extensive and bloody detail – the massacre of the people and the desecration of the churches. The Rus people were not just Christians, they were Orthodox Christians.