The Icon and the Axe

protected location on the raised west bank of the Dnieper, Kiev soon became a major bastion of Christendom against the warlike pagan nomads of the southern steppe. Economically, it, was an active trading center and probably the largest city in Eastern Europe. Politically, it became the center of a Slavic civilization that was less a distinct territorial state in the modern sense than a string of fortified cities bound by loose religious, economic, and dynastic ties.

Kievan Russia was closely linked with Western Europe;-through trade and intermarriages with every important royal family of Western Christendom.4 Russia is mentioned in such early epics as the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied.5 Indeed, the cultural accomplishments of the high medieval West which these works represent might not have been possible without the existence of a militant Christian civilization in Eastern Europe to absorb much of the shock of invasions by less civilized steppe peoples.

These promising early links with the West were, fatefully, never made secure. Increasingly, inexorably, Kievan Russia was drawn eastward into a debilitating struggle for control of the Eurasian steppe.

The political history of this the greatest undivided land mass in the world has been only very partially recorded. Like the Scyths, Sarmatians, and Huns before them (and their Mongol contemporaries and adversaries), the Russians were to acquire a reputation ?.more stable societies for both ruggedness and cruelty. But unlike all the others who dominated the steppe, the Russians succeeded-not just in conquering but in civilizing the entire region, from the Pripet Marshes and the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas in the east.

The inspiration for this accomplishment came from neither Europe nor Asia, but from a Byzantine Empire that lay between the two, Greek in speech but Oriental in magnificence. The Byzantine capital of Constantinople lay on the strait of water separating Europe from Asia and connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and the rivers leading into the heartland of Central and Eastern Europe: the Danube, the Dnieper, and the Don. Known as the "new" or "second" Rome, this city of Constantine continued to rule the Eastern half of the old Roman Empire for almost a thousand years after the Western Roman Empire had crumbled.

Of all the cultural accomplishments of Byzantium, none was more important than the bringing of Christianity to the Slavs. When the Holy Land, North Africa, and Asia Minor fell to Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, Byzantium was forced to turn north and east to recoup its fortunes. By the ninth century, Constantinople had regained the self-confidence needed for fresh expansion. The long-debated questions of Christian doctrine had been resolved by the seven councils of the Church; Islamic invaders

had been repelled from without and puritanical iconoclasts rejected within the capital. Emperors and Patriarchs had both begun to challenge the authority of a West not yet clearly emerging from the Dark Ages.

Thej-apidjixtostor^ of: Byzantine political and cultural influence into the Balkans during the ninth century dramatized the exuberance of this "second golden age" of Byzantine history. The key moment in this penetration was the mission to the Slavs of two Greek brothers from the borderlands of the Slavic world in Macedonia: Cyril, a widely traveled and rcndwnedsctfolaf, and Methodius', ah administrator with experience in Slavic-speaking areas of the Byzantine Empire. In distant Moravia and later in Bulgaria, they helped turn vernacular Slavic into a written language suitable for translating the basic'books of Orthodox Christendom. They apparently did their first work with the exotic and specially invented Glagolitic alphabet; but their followers soon concentrated on the Cyrillic alphabet, which had many relatively familiar Greek letters. A rich store of Christian literature was transcribed in both alphabets within a half century of thejnissionaries' death.* Slavonic became the language of worship of all Orthodox Slavs; and Cyrillic,"which ???? the name of the more scholarly brother, became the alphabet of the Bulgarians and South Slavs.

When the followers of Cyril and Methodius extended these liturgical and literary activities to Kievan Russia in the tenth and the early eleventh century, the Eastern Slavs acquired a language that had become (together with Latin and Greek) one of the three languages of writing and worship in medieval Christendom. Though subjected to many changes and variations, Church Slavonic remained the basic literary language of Russia until late in the seventeenth century.