The mighty Prince Sviatoslav was dead and his skull now was the chalice of the Pecheneg
Khan, a grim reminder of the fate that oft awaited overambitious conquerors.
In the interregnum that followed his death, a great Prince would rise amidst fire and
blood, a man torn between the old ways and the new, who in time would be known as one
of the greatest cultural fathers of Russian history.
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Upon Prince Sviatoslav’s demise in 972, Rus was divided between his sons.
The eldest - Yaropolk, ruled from the traditional capital of Kiev.
The middle child, Oleg, ruled the rich land of the Drevlians, a tribe that had been thoroughly
brought to heel by his grandmother Olga.
Finally, the youngest of the three, Vladimir, ruled from the northern capital of Novgorod.
The bastard son of a slave, he was overshadowed by his two half-brothers.
Each of them were under the influence of the lesser lords - the Boyars.
For instance, Vladimir’s domain was administered by his maternal uncle, the ambitious Dobrynya,
while Yaropolk’s realm was run by one of Sviatoslav’s veterans, the Norse warlord
Sveinaldr.
With three puppeteered by ambitious men, the Kievan state was a powder keg just waiting
to be lit.
According to legend, that spark came sometime in 974, when the son of Sveinaldr, Lyut wandered
into the land of the Drevlians on a hunting trip and was discovered by Oleg, who demanded
to know who had the nerve to poach game from his forest.
Lyut introduced himself as the son of Sveinaldr, and was promptly executed by Oleg.
We can assume this was done at the behest of his own scheming boyars.
Back in Kiev, Sveinaldr was furious about the death of his son, and put immense pressure
upon Yaropolk to make war upon Oleg.
The Norse Regent was motivated both by vengeance, and the prospect of controlling the rich Drevlian
forest.
Initially hesitant, Yaropolk was eventually cowed to Sveinaldr’s will, and in 976 marched
his armies into Drevlian territory.
Oleg’s forces were handily crushed by Sveinaldr.
The prince fled with his army to the town of Ovruch, where in a frantic panic they trampled
one another to get over the narrow drawbridge and behind the safety of the town walls.
Yaropolk and Sveinaldr arrived a day later and demanded that Ovrush surrender Prince
Oleg.
Instead, the townsfolk pointed to their external moat.
It was revealed that in the panic, Oleg, like many of his men, had been pushed off the drawbridge,
where he had drowned in the muddy waters below.
According to legend, Yaropolk, ordered his brother’s corpse to be dragged from the
mire and laid atop a clean rug.
Weeping heavily, he addressed Sveinaldr.
“Rejoice now, your wish is fulfilled.”
In Novgorod, Prince Vladimir received the news of what had transpired.
Advised that Yaropolk would likely attack him next, he fled to Norway to seek refuge
with his relative, King Haakon Sigurdsson.
Taking advantage of this flight, Yaropolk installed loyal boyars in Novgorod, effectively
seizing control of the entire Kievan Rus.
Vladimir, however, was not idle in his exile.
Proving charismatic, the youth recruited an army of warriors in Norway and sailed back
to Novgorod with his Vikings, kicking out Yaropolk’s boyars and sending a message:
“Vladimir is marching against you.
Prepare for war.”
Before his southward march, Vladimir wanted to secure an alliance with the powerful Ragnvald,
the Viking ruler of the Polotsk tribe, who lived in modern Belarus.
The Prince sought a marriage with Ragnvald’s daughter, Ragnhild, but was rebuked with disgust,
as the latter claimed that she would never marry the bastard son of a slave.
This rejection infuriated Vladimir and his uncle Dobrynya, whose sister was the very
slave in question.
The prince gathered his Viking mercenaries and all the Slavic tribes of the north, conquered
Polotsk, slew Ragnvald and took Ragnhild by right of conquest.
Vladimir then commenced his southwards campaign upon Yaropolk.
His armies soon overran the tribes of the south, forcing the Prince of Kiev to flee
to the town of Rodnia, pursued doggedly by his vengeful younger brother.
On June 11th of 978, Yaropolk gave up the fight, emerging from the city gates to make
peace with his brother.
Instead, he was cut down by Vladimir’s Norse soldiers.
The interregnum was over, and Vladimir now entered Kiev as the Grand Prince of Rus.
Vladimir chose to commemorate his triumph over his older brother by reinforcing polytheism
in his realm, uniting his followers by erecting not only Slavic, but also Norse, Finnic and
even Iranian gods on the hilltop above Kiev.
Reportedly, the new Grand Prince was the archetypal heathen warlord.
He feasted and feuded freely, while indulging in the company of five wives and over 800
concubines, many of whom he’d seized forcefully and enslaved.
He was even known to engage in bloody rituals involving human sacrifice.
Whether this portrait of a ruthless barbarian king is true, or the biased invention of later
Christian chroniclers we may never know.
Like his father, Vladimir spent a good chunk of his early reign making war.
In 981, his armies seized much of Red Ruthenia, forming a borderland between the Rus and the
powerful Piast Kings of Poland.
This would be the first conflict of significance between the proto-Russians and their western
Slavic cousins, but as many are aware, far from the last.
In the following years, Vladimir would suppress rebellions of his subject tribes, the Vyatichi
and the Radimichians.
He then turned his armies eastwards to the Volga Bulgars, defeating them in battle and
making them subservient to him.
Still somewhat under the influence of his uncle, Vladimir had grown into a ruler to
be reckoned with.
Yet throughout his early successes, the specter of faith hung over him.
We must now jump back in time, and discuss the spread of monotheism in the east.
The conversion of Olga in the 950s had been the Rus peoples’ first real introduction
to Christianity.
However, the influence of the monotheistic faiths had been making gains in the states
surrounding Rus for decades before that.
The Latins and Greeks of the Frankish and Byzantine Empires, along with the Muslims
of the Persianized Abbasid Caliphate, were wealthy, powerful bearers of noble cultural
legacies.
As such, formerly animist and pagan peoples from central Europe to the eastern Steppe
began converting to their monotheistic faiths to earn themselves a legitimate place in the
political world of these economic and cultural heavyweights.
The Khazars had been among the first to follow this trend.
Before their destruction at the hands of Prince Sviatoslav, their ruling elite had adopted
Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic faiths.
Meanwhile their neighbours, the Volga Bulgar tribes, had converted to Islam in 922, seeking
closer ties to their crucial trading partners in Abbasid Baghdad.
Christianity had begun making headway in the 860s, when two missionary brothers, Cyril
and Methodius, set out from their native Byzantium to spread the Orthodox Christian rite to the
Slavic peoples.
They travelled to the lands of Great Moravia, where they learned the local western Slavic
language, and created for it a written script based on Greek letters, known as Glagolitic.
Using their new alphabet as a cornerstone, they standardized many western Slavic dialects
into old Church Slavonic, which became their new liturgical language.
Now able to attend Church services in a tongue familiar to them, the Western Slavs were Christianized.
The Catholic rite eventually prevailed in Moravia, but Slavonic Christianity found success
elsewhere.
The Danubian Bulgars had converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity in 864 but didn’t
want to become too culturally dependent on their long-time Byzantine rivals.
As a result, they welcomed the disciples of Cyril and Methodius into their lands, adopting
the Slavonic church tongue over Byzantine Greek as the official language of their people,
which is one of the reasons why arguably Turkic Bulgarians speak a Slavic tongue today.
Furthermore, the Bulgars streamlined the unwieldy Glagolitic into something easier - this Cyrillic
alphabet named posthumously after Cyril.
Prince Vladimir was slowly realizing that when his Grandmother Olga had converted decades
earlier, it had not been an admission of weakness, but an act of cunning.
War brought glory to the Rus, but trade and commerce was the lifeblood of the realm.
The Princes of Kiev had maintained trade relations with their neighbours, but in order to deepen
their ties with the wealthiest realms of Eurasia, they needed monotheism.
Once more, it is Nestor’s chronicle that tells the legend of Vladimir’s conversion.
In 987, the Grand Prince had envoys sent to learn about Judaism, Islam, Latin Christianity
and Greek Christianity, to choose which faith would be the best fit for his people.
Vladimir was unimpressed by Judaism, pithily asking why a people exiled from their homeland
could be a model to follow.
Islam did not make a great impression either, as rather than venturing to the splenderous
city of Baghdad, the Rus envoys learned about the faith from the Muslims of Volga Bulgaria,
remarking: “there is no gladness among them; only sorrow and a great stench; their religion
is not a good one.”
Upon learning that Islam prohibited the consumption of alcohol, Vladimir remarked: “Drinking
is the joy of the Rus, we cannot exist without that pleasure”.
Meanwhile, the Rus emissaries who had travelled to the western lands of the Franks proclaimed
that their Churches were unimpressive, and that their Latin rites were ‘without beauty’.
Only in the Eastern Roman Empire did the envoys find joy.
In Constantinople, they bore witness to the full splendor of Orthodox ritual within the
opulence of the Hagia Sophia.
Upon their return, they said to their Prince: “We no longer knew whether we were in heaven
or on earth, nor such beauty, and we know not how to tell of it.”
Vladimir was sold upon the path of Byzantine Christianity, and the future of the Rus people
was decided.
Despite these colourful anecdotes, the real reason for Vladimir’s choice was most likely
a matter of pragmatism.
Of all the lands his envoys went to, Eastern Rome was the closest and richest, and furthermore,
the expeditions of Igor and Oleg had already secured them a working, if rocky, relationship
with the Greeks.
Therefore, Vladimir stood to gain more politically and economically by choosing Eastern Orthodox
Christianity over Islam, Judaism, or the Latin rite.
The Grand Prince was still a warrior at heart, and wanted to convert on his own terms.
To that end, he marched southwards with his army and took the Byzantine city of Chersonesus
on the tip of the Crimea.
From that position of power, he made a bold offer to Byzantine Emperor Basil II: “I
have learned that you have an unmarried sister, if you will not give her to me, I shall do
to Constantinople the very same as with Chersonesus.”
To the Eastern Romans, it was nigh unheard of for a Byzantine Princess to be married
off to some marauding northern Barbarian.
However, Basil was busy dealing with insurrection in his Empire, fighting the rebellious general
Bardas Phokas.
He was in no position to open another front against the Rus.
It was a decidedly better option to make an ally of them.
Thus, the Roman Emperor agreed to give up his sister on two caveats.
First, that Vladimir would send military aid to help him crush Phokas’ rebellion, and
second, that the Rus Prince would convert to Orthodox Christianity, which he wanted
to do anyway.
In 988, the deal was struck.
Vladimir was baptized in Chersonesus, renouncing his many consorts and marrying Princess Anna.
He then went home, returning the town to the Greeks.
True to his word, Vladimir sent a force of 6,000 Norse warriors across the Bosphorus,
where they crushed Phokas’ insurrection.
So impressed were the Byzantines by these northern warriors, that Varangian mercenaries
would become the principal honour guard of the Eastern Roman Emperors for centuries to
come.
Meanwhile, Vladimir’s first order of business was to have his sons and Boyars baptized,
and he managed that with little difficulty.
Next, he smashed the idols upon the hills above Kiev, which he himself had erected barely
ten years prior.
On every street of the capital, town criers declared that by decree of the Prince, every
man, woman and child was to come to the banks of the river, where they would all be christened
in a mass baptism.
Some went willingly, while some were coerced by threats of violence.
Whatever the method, the people of Kiev were all baptized in the waters of the Dnieper.
Originally distressed at being forced to marry a violent, barbarian brute, Princess Anna
came to see in herself a holy duty.
Throughout her reign as Grand Princess, she served as the principal religious advisor
for her husband, and founded several churches.
The Slavs called her “Czarina,” due to her Imperial heritage, and she soon became
beloved among them.
Indeed, Christianity soon spread beyond the heartlands of Kiev and into every corner of
the Rus realm.
The Greeks loaned Vladimir many architects, who built Byzantine-style churches where shrines
to Perun, Veles and Stribog once stood.
Meanwhile, the Danuabian Bulgars sent their clergymen north as well.
The peoples of the Rus soon came to favour the liturgy of the Bulgarians, whose Old Church
Slavonic was much more closely related to their old East Slavic tongue than new testament
Greek.
Along with Church Slavonic came the spread of the Cyrillic alphabet, which remains in
use in Russia and beyond today.
This mass conversion was not entirely peaceful, as many still clung to the old gods.
In Novgorod, the elderly Dobrynya spread the Christian faith, as per his nephew’s will.
However, he was attacked by a violent pagan mob, which set fire to his home and killed
his wife.
In the end, the old regent forced the city to convert by fire and sword.
Pockets of the Rus undoubtedly clung on to the old ways for a time, but by the end of
Vladimir’s reign, all major cities and centers of commerce became Christian by persuasion
or force.
The rest of Prince Vladimir’s reign passed relatively uneventfully.
For nearly two decades, the Rus maintained a stable peace with all their neighbours.
The lone exception being the Turkic Pechenegs, whose horse archers semi-regularly raided
Kievan lands.
In response, Vladimir had a network of fortresses built upon the rivers bordering the eastern
steppes to fend off their incursions.
This would simply be the latest chapter of a long struggle between Rus and the steppe
peoples on their periphery.
In his later years, Vladimir was said to be a kindly ruler.
In accordance with Christian precepts, he provided charity to the poor and sick, and
made efforts to travel to the more isolated areas in his realm, listening to the petitions
of those who otherwise would never have gotten to meet him.
He passed away from natural causes in 1015 leaving behind a massively different country
to the one he had inherited 30 years earlier.
No longer was the Rus a land of warlords and tribesmen.
It was now a veritable Christian Empire, competing toe to toe with the successors of Greeks and
Romans in economic and cultural influence.
It is on this high note that we will end this episode.
Next time, the Kievan Rus will enter its golden age, but even in a newly christened nation
of saints and scholars, dark clouds loomed over the horizon, so make sure you are subscribed
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