The Baptism of Rus’

Christianity had reached the Rus’ before Vladimir the Great. In 867 Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, wrote that they had accepted a bishop and pastor (Photius, Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs 35). Olga of Kyiv, whom the chronicle calls Vladimir’s grandmother (Primary Chronicle, year 987), was baptized at Constantinople; the Primary Chronicle tells it as a tale in which she outwits the emperor (Primary Chronicle, years 948–955), and a German annalist records under 959 that envoys of Helena, queen of the Rus’, who had been baptized at Constantinople, asked King Otto for a bishop (Continuator of Regino, year 959). Her son and her people stayed pagan (Primary Chronicle, years 948–955).

The chronicle of Kyiv, written over a century after the event, tells Vladimir’s conversion as a deliberate choice. In 986, it says, he was visited in turn by Muslim Bulgars, by Germans sent by the pope, by Jewish Khazars and by a Greek scholar, and questioned each about their faith (Primary Chronicle, year 986). The next year he sent ten men to see how each people worshipped. Those who came back from Constantinople said that in the Greeks’ church they had not known whether they were in heaven or on earth (Primary Chronicle, year 987).

In 988, the chronicle continues, Vladimir besieged the Greek city of Chersonesus on the Black Sea and took it by cutting its water supply. He demanded the emperors’ sister Anna in marriage; they answered that she could not marry a pagan. She came with priests, and Vladimir, who had been struck with blindness, was baptized by the bishop of Cherson, recovered his sight and married her. The chronicler notes that others placed the baptism at Kyiv or at Vasil’ev (Primary Chronicle, year 988). Back in Kyiv he had the idols destroyed and the image of Perun dragged to the river, and summoned the whole city to the Dnieper, where the people were baptized by the priests from Cherson and those of the princess. He built churches where the idols had stood and sent the children of leading families to be taught letters (Primary Chronicle, year 988).

Writers closer to the events tell of politics. Yahya of Antioch says that Basil II, threatened by the revolt of Bardas Phokas, asked the king of the Rus’ for help; the king married the emperor’s sister on condition that he and his people be baptized, and the emperor sent metropolitans and bishops who baptized them (Yahya of Antioch, History, pp. 423–424). Psellus mentions the “Scythian” troops who then fought for Basil (Psellus, Chronographia 1.13), and Leo the Deacon, after telling of the rebel’s death, names the capture of Cherson among disasters foretold by signs in the sky (Leo the Deacon, History 10.10). As the translators of the chronicle reconstruct it from these writers, the alliance came first and the attack on Cherson later, the reverse of the chronicle’s order.

Rus’ thus took its bishops from Constantinople and its books in Slavonic, the legacy of Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs (Primary Chronicle, years 888–898). The chronicle itself, written after the Schism of 1054, has the Greek teacher warn Vladimir against the Latins (Primary Chronicle, year 986).