Christianity in Ukraine

The famed baptism of Rus' by which Grand Prince Volodymyr the Great accepted Christianity as the official religion of his realm sometime in the late 980s does not mark the first appearance of that religion on Ukrainian territory.

Whether or not the story of St Andrew is true, written evidence and archae­ological remains reveal that Christianity was well established as one of the many religions flourishing in the coastal cities along the northern Black Sea and Sea of Azov during the first century ce. The Crimea and the revived Bosporan Kingdom under Roman hegemony in particular became a refuge for Christians fleeing from persecution. The most famous of these refugees was the fourth pope, St Clement I, who in the year 92 was banished to Chersone­sus. He found several thousand Christians in the city and converted many more people to Christianity before he was put to death in 101 on the orders of the Roman emperor. Clement’s memory remained alive in Rus' lands, and in 860 his remains were exhumed by the Byzantine missionary Constantine and sent to Rome. T hen, in 989, when Grand Prince Volodymyr the Great was baptized and married, Clement’s head was sent as a relic to the newly Chris­tianized Rus' leader, whose successors preserved it as a sacred treasure for the next several centuries.

After Clement, Christianity continued to flourish in the coastal cities and the steppe hinterland. The Germanic Gothic tribes who invaded Ukrainian lands in the third century had already accepted some form of Christianity - the Visigoths Arianism, and the Ostrogoths Eastern Byzantine Christianity.

Christianity flourished to an even greater degree after the sixth century, when the Crimean coastal cities came under direct Byzantine control. The local Byzantine administrative center, Chersonesus, was the site of many churches, and the whole coastal region became a refuge for Christian dissi­dents, including Pope Martin I. At the height of the iconoclast controversy.

which gave rise to profound political and cultural disruptions in the Byzantine Empire during the eighth and early ninth centuries, many more discontented bishops, monks, and clergy arrived in the Crimea. It was during this expansion of Christianity that in Tamatarcha (later Tmutorokan'), on the eastern shore of the Straits of Kerch, a bishopric was established sometime in the 730s under the jurisdiction of the Gothic metropolitanate at Doros, which was in turn sub­ordinate to Constantinople, Although the Tamatarcha bishopric is not men­tioned again until the 970s, in the interim it had come to be inhabited by the Varangian Rus', a development prompting some writers to consider Tmutorokan' the first Rus' eparchy.

With the arrival of the Varangian Rus' in Kiev and their early contacts with Byzantium, Christianity was established in the middle Dnieper region. Fol­lowing the Varangian attack on Constantinople led by Askol'd and Dir in 860, their Rus' ambassadors to Byzantium were baptized, and they brought the new' faith back to Kiev. It is not clear w'hethcr Askol'd and Dir themselves ever converted, but the Byzantine patriarch Photius announced in 867 that the formerly feared Rus' were now' Christian ‘subjects and friends’ living under the spiritual authority of the Byzantine Empire.

Aside from the long-term Gothic Christian presence in the southern Ukrainian lands (the Crimea) and the appearance of the faith in the Kiev region during the 860s, Christianity also made inroads in far western Ukraine. This development was related to the activity of the ‘Apostles to the Slavs,’ the Byzantine envoys Constantine/Cyril and Methodius, whose mission at various times between 863 and 885 in Moravia, in the heart of central Europe, coin­cided with the political influence of the Great Moravian Empire. By the second half of the ninth century, the sphere of influence of that empire included far western Ukrainian lands, where the eparchies of Przemysl (Peremyshl') in Galicia and of Mukachevo in Transcarpathia are reputed to have been estab­lished by the Byzantine missionaries in the 890s or, in the more questionable case of Mukachevo, as early as the 860s.

All these observations lead certain authors (Chubaty, Bilaniuk) to maintain that there has been an unbroken Christian presence on Ukrainian territory from apostolic times, through the official ‘baptism of Rus” in about 988, to the present. Accepting this premise, they argue that the Ukrainian church, not­withstanding its Eastern Christian orientation, is an apostolic one whose ori­gins go back to the very beginnings of Christianity.

marriage of the Byzantine emperor’s daughter. Nor was the prize to be just any royal offspring, but a daughter born in the royal bedchamber, literally bom into the imperial purple (porphyrogenesis), who might be described more prosaically as someone of ‘blue blood.’ Before the marriage could take place, Volodymyr had to be baptized and agree to bring his entire realm into the Christian sphere of Byz­antine influence.

The sequence of these events has remained a source of controversy to this day. Some scholars argue that local Kievan influences may have prompted Volodymyr to accept Christianity even without Byzantium’s political incentive. Moreover, he may have been baptized already, before agreeing to be ‘re-baptized’ in response to Byzantine demands. Finally, there is a question as to whether these events took place in 987, 988, or 989. What we do know is that in 988 Volodymyr supplied mil­itary aid to the Byzantine emperor, who was consequently able to retain his throne. We also know that the Rus' captured the Byzantine city of Chersonesus in the Crimea, an action which probably encouraged the emperor to live up to his side of the political bargain. In the end, Volodymyr the Great returned trium­phantly to Kiev in 990, accompanied by his new bride ‘born of imperial purple.’

Volodymyr seems to have wasted little time in exchanging the recently estab­lished pagan state religion for the Christian one. Over a century later, the Primary Chronicle described in dramatic detail how the pagan idols were ‘overthrown,’ some ‘cut to pieces and others burned with fire,’ and how the citizens of Kiev were brought en masse to the Dnieper River to mark the symbolic baptism of Rus'.¹ The construction of numerous churches followed; priests and church books were brought from Byzantium and, later, its other Slavic cultural satellite, Bulgaria; and the Byzantine model of church administration was set up - the basic unit being the eparchy (usually headed by a bishop), with a number of eparchies joined together in a metropolitan province (headed by a metropolitan). Missionary activ­ity began as early as 990, and although there was often fierce local resistance to the new faith, seven new eparchies (Kiev, Volodymyr-Volyns'kyi, Bilhorod, Chernihiv, Polatsk, Turau, and Novgorod) were set up during Volodymyr’s reign.

In order to finance this new venture, Volodymyr assigned one-tenth of the state’s income to the Christian church.

Despite the aggressive efforts at proselytization begun under Volodymyr the Great, the acceptance of Christianity by the inhabitants of Kievan Rus' spread only gradually. The faith may have taken hold early on in Kiev and other urban centers, but it was to be several more centuries before it took root in the country­side, where pagan traditions continued to flourish. Nonetheless, Volodymyr began a process that provided, via Christianity, an ideological mortar which enhanced the unity of Kievan Rus'. Thus, at the same time that the concept of Rus' was being associated with the territory and inhabitants of the Kievan realm, it was also beginning to take on a religious connotation. In short, being Rus' and being of the Orthodox Christian faith came to denote the same thing.

The association with Christianity served Kievan Rus' well also in its foreign affairs. Because they now shared the same faith and Christian culture and, in theory, recognized the authority of the same ‘god-anointed’ temporal ruler, the Byzantine emperor, the Rus' were finally accepted into the larger Byzantine Com­monwealth. Closer to home, the introduction of a unified ideology in the form of Christianity helped in the defense against the Pechenegs, who renewed their attacks from the steppes on several occasions toward the end of the century (988, 992, 996, and 997). In the end, Volodymyr turned the Pecheneg threat into a political advantage, by seizing the opportunity to call upon the Christian Rus' people to struggle against the infidels. The inhabitants of Kievan Rus' now had a sense of common purpose - to protect the Rus' nation and faith.

By the time of the death of Volodymyr the Great in 1015, Kievan Rus' had increased its political and ideological control over the various territories of the realm and had enhanced its relationship with Byzantium while protecting and even expanding its borders in the face of conflict with its neighbors to the west, east, and south. But the problem of succession had not been resolved, and con­flict among Volodymyr’s several sons was to rage for nearly a decade. In this new round of internecine struggle, two of his sons played a role that was to become immortalized in Rus' and East Slavic culture. These were Borys/Boris and Hlib/ Gleb, true Christian believers who, following the principle of non-violence, refused to resist the assassinations carried out against them in 1015 by another brother’s soldiers. As a result of their unwillingness ‘to resist evil with evil,’ the martyrs Borys and Hlib became the first Rus' Christians to be canonized.

laroslav the Wise

In 1024, after nearly a decade of internal conflict, stability returned to Kievan Rus'. In that year, two of the brothers, laroslav and Mstyslav, emerged as the strongest contenders. Although Volodymyr’s oldest surviving son, laroslav, had held the title of grand prince of Kiev since 1019, he had preferred to remain in the north, in Novgorod, where he had ruled during his father’s lifetime. With no prince resident in Kiev, laroslav in Novgorod and Mstyslav in Chernihiv remained at peace, divid­ing the realm into two spheres of influence roughly along the Dnieper River. Work­ing together, they recaptured the western borderlands (lost during the internecine struggle after Volodymyr’s death) from the Poles, and they increased trade with Byzantium. It was also during this period that Tmutorokan' (part of Mstyslav’s patrimony) came to play an important role in Kievan Rus' history. As long as the Dnieper trade route was threatened in the open steppe region by the Pechenegs, Kiev’s economic prosperity suffered. Consequently, Novgorod and Chernihiv were able for a while to increase their own trade at Kiev’s expense. Chernihiv was itself linked to a trade route that went up the Desna and Seim Rivers and across a land portage to the upper Don River. From there, traders could descend the Don, pass through the Rus' fortress at Bila Vezha, and continue across the Sea of Azov to Rus'

Tmutorokan', which itself, located on the strategic Straits of Kerch, lay at the junc­ture of several commercial routes extending eastward to Central Asia and Trans­caucasia, and southwestward to Constantinople.

The unity of the Kievan realm was further strengthened in 1036, when Mstyslav suddenly died. laroslav now became in fact as well as in name the grand prince and undisputed sovereign of all of Rus', from Novgorod to Tmutorokan'. He decided to leave Novgorod and make Kiev once again the realm’s political and cultural capital. His first step was to secure Kiev against the Pechenegs, who in the interim had become victims of the traditional nomadic fate on the steppes. Since the late ninth century, the Pechenegs had been the dominant force in the open steppe between the lower Don and lower Danube Rivers, but now they were being forced out by the Torks, who in turn were being pressured by new invaders from the east - the Polovtsians (also known as the Cumans or Kipchaks).

In the face of Tork pressure, the frightened Pechenegs moved north and attempted to capture Kiev itself, but they were defeated in 1036 by a Rus' army led by laroslav. This victory over the Pechenegs was to be memorialized in a special way: it was supposedly on the battle site that, in commemoration of an earlier vic­tory in 1019 (also over the Pechenegs), laroslav began construction of Kiev’s mon­umental Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom, or Cathedral of St Sophia. As for the formerly feared Pechenegs, some moved farther south and attacked the Byzantine Empire. In 1091, the Pechenegs were crushed by a Byzantine army (in alliance with the Polovtsians), and soon they disappeared as a distinct political force. Some Pechenegs had remained along the Ros' River south of Kiev, which served as the frontier with the steppe. There they joined with the remnants of the Torks and other Turkic groups (driven from the steppe by the Polovtsians) to form a new confederation known as the Karakalpaks. Referred to in the Rus' chronicles as Chomi Klobuky, or Black Caps, the Karakalpaks along the Ros' River frontier were to remain allies of the Rus' princes.

The Karakalpak experience reveals a lesser-known aspect of Kievan Rus' soci­ety. Although the Kievan historical chronicles (and subsequent historians and bel- letrists) invariably paint the steppe nomads in the darkest of colors as the pagan enemies of the Christian Rus', more often than not the two groups cooperated and interacted at many levels. Certain nomads like the Karakalpaks not only pro­tected the frontier principalities (especially Pereiaslav and Chernihiv) against the attacks of their fellow Turkic Polovtsians, but also played an important role in Rus' politics, by marrying into Rus' princely families and serving as mercenaries for various sides in the interprincely feuds that racked the Kievan realm.

In addition to the southern steppe frontier, laroslav was concerned with the northwest. There he subdued the Mazovians and latvigians, and his son Volody­myr, who replaced him in Novgorod, brought several of the Finnic groups directly under Rus' hegemony. In the far south, however, laroslav was less successful. Increased trade with Byzantium caused commercial rivalry and sometimes conflict between Rus' merchants and Byzantine officials. In an attempt to resolve these disputes, in 1043 laroslav sent a large fleet to attack Constantinople, but it met an ignominious defeat.

Whether or not laroslav was always successful against his foreign neighbors, he consistently carried out a policy of marital diplomacy. His western European ties were especially strong. His second wife, Ingigard, was the daughter of the king of Sweden (Olaf); of his daughters, Anastasia was married to the king of Hungary (Andras I), Elizabeth to the king of Norway (Harold the Stern), and Anna to the King of France (Henry); and of his sons, Iziaslav was married to the daughter of the king of Poland, Sviatoslav to the sister of the bishop of Trier, in Germany, and Vsevolod to a Byzantine imperial princess. By means of these marital ties, Kievan Rus' became well known throughout Europe.

laroslav is remembered not only for his military victories and diplomatic initia­tives, but also for the beautification of Kiev. During his reign, five major buildings were erected: a new citadel with its monumental entrance, the Golden Gate; three churches (the Annunciation above the Golden Gate, St George, and St Irene); and, most important in the whole medieval cityscape of Kiev, the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom, or Cathedral of St Sophia. Finally, laroslav enhanced the sense of unity throughout Kievan Rus' that had begun to develop under his father, Volo­dymyr the Great. He did so by means of the church, creative writing, and law.

In negotiations with Byzantium, laroslav persuaded the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople - the ultimate authority in the Eastern Christian world - to appoint for Kiev a metropolitan to head the Rus' church. The first appointee to the influential post of Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus' was a Greek, Theopem- ptos, who arrived from Byzantium in 1037. Kiev’s metropolitan was also given two assistant bishops (based in the new eparchies of lur'iev and Bilhorod, near Kiev), and another eparchy was created in Pereiaslav. The Byzantine-Rus' war beginning in 1043 had an effect on church relations, however, and laroslav felt obliged to challenge the jealously guarded influence of the Byzantium Empire as exerted through its ecclesiastical representatives. In 1051, the grand prince successfully arranged for the election of liarion, a loyal Kievan intellectual, as the first native of Rus' to become metropolitan.

To promote native Rus' intellectual life as well as to instill a sense of political unity, laroslav commissioned the preparation of historical chronicles tracing the history of his realm from earliest times to the present. A further sense of common social order throughout the Kievan realm was encouraged by his commissioning the preparation of a law code. Known as the Pravda Russkaia, or Rus' Law, this compilation of mostly common law was, in an otherwise brutal era, noted for its mild punishments, which consisted of various kinds of payment instead of impris­onment or death. Because of his diplomatic skills, cultural interests, and codifica­tion of the first written law code in any Slavic land, laroslav came to be known in Rus' history as ‘the Wise.’

laroslav hoped to impart some of his wisdom to future generations, and in the last years of his life he tried to put some order into the process of the succession and transfer of political power, the settling of which had destabilized Kievan Rus' following the death of each grand prince. His solution was to group the lands of Kievan Rus' into five patrimonies, each to be assigned to one of his sons, with a sixth land (Polatsk) ruled by his brother. The eldest son became the grand prince