Sailing from Byzantium (26 page)

Under Vladimir's son Yaroslav the Wise, this legacy reached its apogee, giving rise to the golden age of Kievan Rus. Under Yaroslav, Byzantine artists and artisans continued their work in Russia. Among the scores of churches Yaroslav built with Byzantine help, the most famous is St. Sophia in Kiev (1037-46), clearly inspired by the Constantinopolitan original, and where the visitor can see some of the finest surviving examples of eleventh-century Byzantine mosaics and frescoes.

Yaroslav's epithet hints at what the
Primary Chronicle
says explicitly over and over: that the Russian ruler was above all a “lover of books.”

He applied himself to books, and read them continually day and night. He assembled many scribes, and translated from Greek into Slavic. He wrote and collected many books through which true believers are instructed and enjoy religious education…. For great is the profit from book-learning. Through the medium of books, we are shown and taught the way of repentance, for we gain wisdom and continence from the written word. Books are like rivers that water the whole earth; they are the springs of wisdom. For books have an immeasurable depth; by them we are consoled in sorrow.

We don't know where Yaroslav's translators came from. Some were Russians, while others were probably Byzantine Greeks or Slavs, and it seems almost certain that there were Bulgarian monks, priests, and scholars among them as well.

Nor do we know exactly what works were translated, since Old Church Slavonic manuscripts are notoriously hard to date with certainty. Until the twelfth century or so Old Church Slavonic was unusually uniform, so that a tenth-century Bulgarian manuscript looks and reads much like an eleventh-century Russian one. This homogeneous quality itself testifies to the quality and staying power of Cyril's philological achievement.

But scholars have suggested a number of works that may have been translated at this time. Not all are from the Byzantine religious corpus. They include of course numerous lives of saints, monastic rules, and liturgical works, but also legal texts, the
Christian Topography
of the explorer Cosmas Indicopleustes, and a handful of secular works such as Josephus’
History of the Jewish War
and, perhaps, the Byzantine epic of the ninth-century Arab border wars,
Digenes Akritas.

As the Slavic dialects evolved into national tongues marked by mutual incomprehensibility, Old Church Slavonic carried on as the international language of the Byzantine Commonwealth. Only when taken up by the Russians, however, was this status ensured. Its unlikely ricochet success, more than a century after its near extinction in Moravia, helped seal forever the prestige of Cyril's unique and brilliant invention.

On the other hand, by allowing the Slavs to receive Christianity in their own language, Old Church Slavonic delayed their exposure to the rich pre-Christian past, to which the Catholics’ insistence on Latin acted as a gateway for churchmen in the various Western European countries, and to which educated Byzantines had access by virtue of their expertise in Greek. Likewise, if Old Church Slavonic offered the Slavs their own distinctive idiom, it also isolated them
from ongoing developments in the rest of European civilization, which expressed its high culture in Latin and Greek. In this way, the glittering legacy of Cyril and Methodius has been both a blessing and a burden for the Slavic world.

Yaroslav expanded on the foundations laid by his father, Vladimir, to bring Kiev to its fullest flowering under Byzantine tutelage, as architects, artists, and artisans arrived from Byzantium to build, work, and teach in this new Orthodox Christian venue. Militarily, too, the Kievan state, which now took in a vast territory, flaunted its confidence during Yaroslav's reign by crushing the Petchenegs and again attacking Constantinople, in 1043.

This dispute arose over trade issues, after a brawl between Byzantine and Russian merchants in which a prominent Russian was killed. The fighting was bitter and bloody, and the Russian force of some four hundred ships was virtually destroyed, its men either killed or captured. Some of the prisoners had their right hands cut off, which were then displayed on the city's walls for the edification of the public. Others, some eight hundred of them, were blinded, which was the traditional Byzantine punishment for those who had rebelled against the imperial government (Basil II had famously inflicted the same treatment on Bulgarian prisoners). It was the last time the Russians would carry out such an attack.

As earlier, armed conflict proved no impediment to commerce and cultural diffusion. After protracted negotiations the fighting was settled by another trade agreement, and the Russians continued apace their thirsty consumption
of Byzantine Christianity and the whole ready-to-wear cultural ensemble that came with it.

Shortly after the war, another marriage alliance between the two ruling houses demonstrated the continuing strength of these ties. The marriage itself was between Yaroslav's son Vsevolod and an unnamed daughter of the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachus. The offspring of that marriage, known as Vladimir II Monomakh, would eventually take the lead in the losing battle to shore up Kiev's central authority, which proceeded to dissipate among the various Russian principalities after Yaroslav's death in 1056.

This process is often presented in textbooks as “the decline of Kievan Rus,” which is somewhat misleading. The basic political problem for Kiev was the persistent tension between influences that favored centralized political power in Russia and influences that hindered it. Kiev's rulers struggled to build a centralized state. Yet, working against this effort was the Russian custom of dividing an inheritance equally among the sons, which as it expressed itself in the division of political power within ruling dynasties is called the appanage system. The appanage system is a good example of an area in which Byzantine practices were not picked up by the Russians (another was in the codification of Russian law, the Russkaya Pravda, that took place under Yaroslav).

Vladimir the Great, for example, had twelve sons, and each had to get his inheritance, with Kiev itself as the grand prize—literally, since its ruler was styled the “grand prince.” Later, other principalities would wrangle over the aggrandizing title. Because the various sons of a Kievan grand prince would typically each hope to be given a city over which to rule, the appanage system tended to pit these princes against
each other. And of course it made succession in Kiev, theoretically the capital, a perennially tricky issue. Such problems were reinforced by the often intense commercial rivalries between the cities.

Vladimir II Monomakh's reign as grand prince of Kiev, which lasted from 1113 to 1125, represents the last hurrah of central authority against the internecine strife endemic to the appanage system. It's tempting to characterize Vladimir's push to uphold Kiev's authority as a reflection of his Byzantine heritage, Byzantium being generally regarded as a bastion of absolutism, but to make this connection in more than a symbolic way would be a stretch.

More concrete evidence of Vladimir's Byzantine background comes from a cycle of frescoes, probably done during his reign, in Kiev's Church of St. Sophia. The frescoes decorate the walls and vaults of two staircases leading up to the area where the prince's family sat for worship. Set in Constantinople, they depict scenes from the Hippodrome, showing the famous chariot races, as well as jugglers, acrobats, and jousters. The emperor is seen presiding over the games, in crown and imperial robes, and in one scene he rides a white horse in a triumphal procession. The scenes may have been described to Vladimir by his mother, the Byzantine princess whose name has been lost to history.

These frescoes reveal the intimate connection between Byzantine and Russian politics at this time. In Byzantium, such games publicly symbolized the emperor's majesty and authority, and modern scholars have seen the frescoes as Vladimir's attempt to extend the emperor's symbolic sway over Russia as well. Not that there was any notion of actual political sovereignty. But as the supreme head of the Orthodox empire, in Byzantine theory at least the emperor held a
position of special authority over all Orthodox Christians, no matter what political regime they actually lived under.

This conception of the emperor's idealized rule as transcending the merely political would survive Kiev's decline to influence Byzantine patronage of Moscow. In the age to come, when the emperor's actual dominion was slight, his symbolic dominion would still count for much.

The Byzantine world was changing fast now. Byzantium's power collapsed dramatically in the latter half of the eleventh century. By the accession of Alexius I Comnenus in 1081, it was once again hard pressed by new enemies on three fronts. Pushed closer by their defeat at the hands of Yaroslav, the Petchenegs harried the empire from the north, while the Normans in southern Italy threatened from the west, and the Turks pressed into Asia Minor from the east after their victory at Manzikert in 1071.

Though the empire managed to recover under its three brilliant Comnenan emperors—Alexius I, John II, and Manuel I—their successes were those of nimble goalkeepers. And goalkeepers, however miraculous their parrying and deflecting, can only do so much. On Manuel's death, Byzantium was left with an open goal and no shortage of onrushing attackers.

Meanwhile, in Russia, in 1108 Vladimir Monomakh's son Yuri Dolgoruky—“Yuri of the long arm,” so called for his notorious territorial acquisitiveness—founded a new fortified outpost on the Klyazma River in the far northeastern forests, which he named for his father. The town of Vladimir grew in importance, and a half century later Yuri's son and heir, grand prince Andrei Bogolyubsky, moved the capital there from Kiev. He also went on a building spree in and around Vladimir, erecting several exquisitely beautiful churches, built from the area's distinctive white stone, which
no traveler's itinerary should overlook. In addition to being the seat of the grand prince, the principality of Vladimir soon also controlled the prosperous nearby cities of Rostov and Suzdal.

Around the same time, in 1147, we see mentioned for the first time in the sources the small outpost of Moscow, which lay just west of Vladimir on the Moscow River. In 1156, the year before he moved the capital to Vladimir, Andrei Bogolyubsky built the first fortifications around Moscow's center, a ring of earthenwork ramparts known as the Kremlin. Moscow would grow in prosperity, eventually succeeding Vladimir as the seat of the principality.

Relations between Byzantium and the fractious Russian principalities suffered as a new group of Turkic nomads, the Cumans, moved into the steppes during the twelfth century
^∗
The southern principalities of Kiev and Galicia both temporarily broke with Byzantium, allying themselves with Hungary, at that time Byzantium's deadly foe. During these and other tribulations, Byzantine historians noted the steadfast loyalty of the principality of Vladimir. Later, a similarly close relationship would prevail between Byzantium and Vladimir's successor, Moscow.

In the following century, the Orthodox Christian world of the Byzantine Commonwealth suffered two grievous blows. The first came in 1204, when Constantinople fell to the
Western soldiers of the Fourth Crusade. Then, less than two decades later, in 1223, a combined Cuman and Russian army was defeated by the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan at the battle of Kalka. In the winter of 1237-38, his grandson Batu Khan returned to finish the job with a massive invasion of northeastern Russia, starting with the sacks of Riazan in December, Moscow in January, and Vladimir in March.

One by one the Mongols proceeded to pick off the disunited principalities, pillaging and looting as they went, their sophisticated siege techniques easily overpowering the Russian defenses. Kiev fell after a two-week siege in December 1240. Only in 1242 did the Mongols stop their westward advance. Having reached Poland and Hungary, they withdrew inexplicably—for they remained undefeated—to hold the conquered lands of the Central Asian steppe. Their empire now stretched from China to the lower Danube. Batu built his capital of Sarai on the lower Volga. It was to Sarai that the Russian princes would come, humbled and subjugated for two long centuries, bearing their tribute, and serving at the pleasure of the Mongol khan, whom they called tsar.

These two disasters dealt a seemingly fatal blow to the Byzantine world. Only in one institution did the Byzantine idea survive intact: the Byzantine Orthodox Church, as headed by the patriarch of Constantinople. This fact had momentous political consequences as the disastrous thirteenth century unfolded, and would continue to do so as Byzantium—empire and commonwealth—recovered somewhat during the fourteenth. If the emperor's power was increasingly symbolic, the patriarch's was entirely real, in that he controlled the administration of the Orthodox churches that remained under his jurisdiction. He also, of course, retained great spiritual authority over the others.

Of the several Byzantine successor states that vied to win back Constantinople after 1204, the one that ultimately succeeded, the so-called empire of Nicaea, was the one that early on received the blessing of the patriarch of Constantinople. Patriarchal support gave the Nicaean emperors an aura of legitimacy that their rivals lacked, and it was a Nicaean emperor, Michael VIII Paleologos, whose forces retook Constantinople from the Latins in 1261.

Similarly, among the competing Russian principalities that jostled with each other under the Mongol yoke, the Orthodox church provided the only institution whose prestige (not to mention its official administrative structure) transcended all borders. Headed by the metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia, who was appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople, the church in Russia was controlled from Byzantium. For 150 years, until near the end of the fourteenth century, the patriarchate's unofficial but remarkably consistent policy was to take turns regarding the metropolitan's nationality, alternating a Russian-born metropolitan with a Byzantine-born one.