The Baptism of Kievan Rus

Vladimir of Kiev came to power as a vigorous pagan, and the Primary Chronicle records him setting up idols on the hill above the city before he set them aside. In 988 he was baptised and required the population of Kiev to be baptised in the Dnieper, and the eastern Slavs entered the Byzantine church.

The politics are visible in the sources. Vladimir supplied troops to the emperor Basil II at a moment of crisis, and received in return the emperor's sister Anna in marriage, an extraordinary concession for a Byzantine princess and one made conditional on his baptism. A ruler acquiring a prestigious religion, an imperial marriage and an alliance in the same transaction is not an unusual pattern in the conversion of tenth-century Europe.

The choice of Constantinople over Rome carried consequences that outlasted the politics entirely. It brought the Slavonic liturgy created by the mission of Cyril and Methodius, and with it an alphabet, a literary language and a body of translated Greek writing. The religious, artistic and legal culture of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus follows from this decision, as does their alignment with the Eastern rather than the Western half of Christendom when the two divided.

The best known part of the story is almost certainly not history. The Primary Chronicle tells that Vladimir received missions from Muslim Bulgars, Latin Germans, Khazar Jews and Greeks, questioned each, and then sent his own envoys to observe worship in their lands. They found no beauty among the Bulgars and no gladness among the Germans, but at the liturgy in Constantinople they did not know whether they stood in heaven or on earth, and reported that God dwells there among men.

The chronicle was compiled well over a century after the events and is a work of religious and dynastic argument as much as a record. The examination of the faiths follows a literary pattern found elsewhere, the rejections are shaped by later polemic, and the reported reasons for declining Islam and Judaism serve the chronicler's purposes neatly.

None of that makes the passage worthless. It is excellent evidence for how the church of Rus understood its own origins in the twelfth century, and for the standing of the Constantinopolitan liturgy as the argument that could be relied on to persuade. The atlas records the conversion as attested and the testing of the faiths as the chronicler's composition, because a reader who meets the story deserves to know which part is the event and which part is the telling.