The Byzantine Empire and Its Attitude toward Kievan Rus'
The Byzantine Empire comprised roughly the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and after the fall of Rome in 476 CE it carried on the imperial heritage for another thousand years, until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
The terms Byzantine and Byzantium to describe the empire arc of even later origin. The citizens of the empire as well as its rulers always considered and designated themselves first and foremost as Romans (romaioi), even though Byzantium was based along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and Greek was used as the language of administration and culture.The Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire actually came into being before the fall of Rome, when Emperor Constantine I ‘the Great’ (reigned 306-337) decided to transfer his capital to the east. The site chosen was a small Greek settlement, Byzantion, located on the narrow straits of the Bosporus, which separate Europe from Asia and strategically connect the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmora and eventually the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. When the new imperial capital was ready in 330, it was renamed Constantinople in honor of the emperor who had had it built, the same Constantine who also made Christianity the official religion of the empire. Hence, the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire had three basic components: (1) Roman political tradition (with its heritage of written law and authority centralized in a supreme ruler), (2) Hellenic culture (which carried on the tradition of classical Greece), and (3) Christian belief.
During its more than a thousand years of existence, the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire changed often. Its greatest territorial extent was reached in the mid-sixth century under Emperor Justinian I, when it encompassed the northern and southern shores of the eastern Mediterranean, including much of the Balkans, Anatolia, the southern Crimea, and the eastern shores of the Black Sea.
Its nadir came during its final days in the mid-fifteenth century, when the empire was reduced to the imperial capital of Constantinople, the Peloponnesus, and a few other scattered urban centers. For nearly a thousand years, however, and in cultural terms even longer than that, the Byzantine Empire continued to influence not only the lands under its direct political control, but also the many civilizations within what Dimitri Obolensky has recently called the Byzantine Commonwealth. The commonwealth’s sphere included many Slavic peoples and Kievan Rus'. The Byzantine impact on Kievan Rus' has perhaps been summed up best by the American Byzantinist Ihor Scvccnko:'Throughout more than a thousand years of their history, the Byzantines viewed their state as heir to the Roman Empire, which pretended to encompass the whole civilized world. It followed that the Byzantine state, too, was a universal empire, claiming rule over the whole civilized world: that Byzantine emperors were by right world rulers; that the Byzantines were Romans; and that they were the most civilized people in the world. True, they had improved upon their Roman ancestors in that they were Christians; also, by the seventh century the Latin component had all but disappeared from their highbrow' culture, w'hich from then on was essentially Greek; but, like ancient Romans, the Byzantines felt entitled to pour scorn on those who did not share in the fruits of civilization, that is, on the barbarians. The best thing these barbarians could do was to abandon their bestial existence, and to enter - in some subordinate capacity of course - into the family of civilized peoples headed by the Byzantine emperor. The way to civilization led through Christianity, the only true ideology, of w'hich the empire held the monopoly. For Christianity - to be more precise, Byzantine Christianity - meant civilization.
'Throughout a millennium of propaganda, these simple tenets were driven home by means of court rhetoric - the journalism of the Middle Ages - of court ceremonies, of imperial pronouncements and documents, and of coinage.
By the ninth century, the following truths were held to be self-evident in the field of culture: the world was divided into Byzantines and barbarians, the latter including not only the Slavs - who occupied a low place on the list of barbaric nations - but also the Latins; as a city, the New Rome, that is, Constantinople, was superior to all others in art, culture, and size, and that included the Old Rome on the Tiber. God has chosen the Byzantine people to be a new Israel: the Gospels were written in Greek for the Greeks; in His foresight, God had even singled out the Ancient Greeks to cultivate the Arts and Sciences; and in Letters and Arts, the Byzantines were the Greeks’ successors. ‘AU the arts come from us’, exclaimed a Byzantine diplomat.... The Byzantines maintained these claims for almost as long as their state endured.
source: Ihor SevCenko, ‘Byzantium and the Slavs,’ Harvard Ukrainian Studies, VIII, 3/4 (Cambridge, Mass. 1984), pp. 289-290.
sent to Tmutorokan'. Although paganism was to remain entrenched among the Varangian Rus' rulers and their East Slav subjects for some time, when Kiev’s leaders (Ol'ha and her grandson Volodymyr the Great) finally decided to accept Christianity, it was to Byzantium they turned. Therefore, when Volodymyr made Christianity the state religion at the end of the tenth century, he began a process whereby the extensive Rus' lands were endowed with a unifying ideology based on an imported religion that brought with it the more general influence of Byzantine Greek culture.
As early as during Volodymyr the Great’s reign (978-1015), Greek clergy, teachers, and artists came to Kiev, where they firmly established Byzantine models. A debate still continues over the exact ecclesiastical relationship between Byzantium and Kiev during Volodymyr’s reign. Was the early Rus' church independent, or did it receive bishops from Byzantium, or Bulgaria, or Rome? We do know that in 1037, during the reign of laroslav the Wise, the Kievan church was definitively placed under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, that its first known head was a Greek (Metropolitan Theo- pemptos), and that many of his successors were Byzantine Greeks.
Byzantine influence was also apparent in the monastic movement.
Three types of monastic life were followed in Byzantium: (1) the life of the eremites, one of individual solitude, practiced in part on Mount Athos, along the northern shore of the Aegean Sea; (2) the life of the lavra, or hermits, who lived separately and were brought together by an abbot only for Sunday religious services; and (3) the life of the cenobites, in whose monasteries, eventually following the Studite rule, a highly organized and centralized community lived together and practiced identical discipline under the authority of an abbot. The second and especially the third types of Byzantine monasticism were most widespread in Kievan Rus'.Of the seventy or so earliest monasteries founded in the Rus' lands before the thirteenth century, almost all were situated in or near cities. Moreover, the importance of monastic establishments was not limited to the religious sphere. They also played a significant role in the economic and cultural life of Kievan Rus'. It was the monasteries that were largely responsible for spreading the Christian faith and therefore the Rus' identity, and it was within monastic walls that chronicle writing and artistic production such as icon painting were undertaken. By far the most influential of the monasteries in Kievan Rus' was the Monastery of the Caves (Pechers'ka Lavra), founded in 1015 just outside of the city of Kiev, along the cliffs on the right bank of the Dnieper River. The Monastery of the Caves played a decisive role in the capital city’s economy; it was the primary center of cultural life for all of Kievan Rus'; and it maintained its influence in the realm through the activity of numerous bishops who had been members of its community.
Because of the close relations with Byzantium in the religious and cultural spheres, it is not surprising that the direction of Kievan cultural life was directly affected by events in the great empire to the south. In 1054, soon after the end of Byzantium’s golden age, a split occurred between the eastern and western branches of the Christian church.
This split actually was the culmination of a long process of doctrinal and liturgical difference dating from the first centuries of Christianity, as well as increasing friction between the popes in Rome and the ecumenical patriarchs in Constantinople, each of whom claimed to possess ultimate authority over the Christian flock. The result was the evolution of two distinct Christian traditions: the Roman or Latin in the west, and the Byzantine Greek or Orthodox in the east. At first, the divisions between the two Christian worlds were not impenetrable, and clerics, secular rulers, and intellectuals from Kievan Rus' continued to maintain relations with the Latin west. Eventually, however, the differences increased to the point that a substantial chasm was created between the two branches of the same faith. The result was that the East Slavs of Kievan Rus' and its successor states were to remain in the religious and cultural sphere of the Byzantine, Orthodox East.While it is true that Greek culture reached Kievan Rus' via Byzantium, it was only Greek Christian culture that was of interest to the Rus'. Christian-inspired religious writings as well as Christian models in art and architecture were what dominated the cultural importations from Byzantium; pagan authors of the Greek classical and Hellenic tradition represented in Byzantine humanistic thought remained alien. Because of its non-Christian inspiration, Hellenism from the outset was regarded with suspicion and before long was almost totally disapproved of in Kievan cultural circles.
Kievan Rus' architecture
Christian models from Byzantium were sought after, copied, and adapted without restraint. Byzantium’s influence is most evident in the architectural style of the literally hundreds of churches and monasteries erected in Kievan Rus', the most outstanding of which were the Church of the Dormition, or so-called Tithe Church (Desiatynna), completed under Volodymyr the Great in 996, and the magnificent Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom, or Cathedral of St Sophia, begun in Kiev by laroslav the Wise in 1037.
The Cathedral of St Sophia was completed in 1100, and although its exterior has been radically altered over the centuries, the original interior, with its remarkable mosaics and frescoes, is still intact. The Kievan church took as its namesake the ultimate fount of Orthodoxy, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.The monumental Tithe Church and the Cathedral of St Sophia, like all other churches in Kievan Rus', adopted the centralized Greek cross for their basic ground plan. Over the central transept was built a dome, often gilded on the outside, around which were smaller domes. This form was in stark contrast to the basilica form of western churches, with their long naves and towers above their western facades. Kievan Rus' church interiors also followed Byzantine models and were covered with glittering mosaics. The altars were separated from the congregation by a high screen, known as an iconostasis from the images of the saints, or icons, placed on it. The strict rules associated with icon painting were also transmitted from Byzantium and were followed almost slavishly in the monastery workshops of Kievan Rus'.
Kievan Rus' language and literature
In the realm of literature, Kievan Rus' was also inspired by Byzantium, although it soon began to diverge from Greco-Byzantine models. This was first evident in language. The Old Slavonic written language, which evolved from the ninth-century missionary activity of Cyril and Methodius in the Balkans, eventually found its way to Kievan Rus'. Old Slavonic writings flourished in the First Bulgarian Empire, which had officially become Christian in 865. When the Byzantines destroyed the First Bulgarian Empire in 1018, several Bulgarian refugees fled to Kiev, where under the solicitous rule of laroslav the Wise they continued to propagate the Bulgarian version of what, after taking to itself various local elements, came to be known as Church Slavonic or simply Slavonic. This language served as