Древняя Русь и Скандинавия: Избранные труды

The earliest information about the events connected with the penetration of Christianity in Eastern Europe in the ninth century is preserved in Byzantine and Arabic sources contemporary or a little later than the events they tell about. According to them, one of the first grave and consequential encounters of Kievan princes and their retinues with Christianity took place already in the mid-ninth century. In 860[1368] the Rhos people[1369] attempted the first attack on Constantinople and besieged the city benefiting from the absence of the emperor with the army[1370]. As Patriarch Photius wrote in his two homilies «On the attack of the Rhos» – one was pronounced during the siege (No. Ill) and anotherer immediately after the event (No. IV), it was the miracle of Virgin Mary that saved the city from a disaster[1371]. When her sacred vestment was carried round the walls and dipped in the waters of the Golden Horn, a storm began, the ships of the attackers were destroyed, and «the barbarians gave up the siege and broke camp». The siege of Constantinople by the «barbarians from the North» shocked the Christian world and caused many responses in literature and documents up to the twelfth century.

A description of presumably the same attack is preserved also in the «Primary Chronicle» s. a. 866[1372]. The narration, however, was not based on any local tradition, oral or written, but it was borrowed from the Byzantine Continuation of the Chronicle of Georgius the Monk.

Askold and Dir attacked the Greeks during the fourteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Michael[1373]. When the Emperor had set forth against the infidels and had arrived at the Black river, the eparch sent him word that the Russes were approaching Tsar'grad (Constantinople), and the Emperor turned back. Upon arriving inside the strait, the Russes made a great massacre of the Christians, and attacked Tsar’grad in two hundred boats. The Emperor succeeded with difficulty in entering the city. He straightway hastened with the Patriarch Photius at the Church of the Holy Virgin in Blachernae where they prayed all night. They also sang hymns and carried the sacred vestment of the Virgin to dip it in the sea. The weather was still, and the sea was calm, but a storm of wind came up, and when great waves straightway rose, confusing the boats of the godless Russes, it threw them upon the shore and broke them up, so that few escaped such destruction and returned to their native land[1374].

The only addition of the annalist to Gregorius’s text concerns the names of the leaders of the Rus’, Askold/Oskold (< Höskuldr) and Dir (< Dýr or Dýri). These names belonged to an oral tradition of two Varangian chiefs who seized Kiev, became its rulers and made a raid on Constantinople[1375]. Whether right or not, the compiler identified the events depicted in the Byzantine chronicle with those related in a traditional tale. He did not know, however, other Byzantine writings describing the consequences of the attack.

At the end of 866 or in the first half of 867 Patriarch Photius wrote an encyclical letter inviting Eastern bishops to participate in the counsil that was to be held in Constantinople in 867. He mentioned the attack of the Rhos and consequent developments so important for the Eastern Church that Photius felt necessary to inform the bishops about them. In the first part of his letter he described the conversion of the Bolgars and the renovation of the Armenian Church. At the end of the letter he returns to the missionary activity of Constantinople and adds that not only the Bolgars changed their former impiousness for the faith in Christ but even the nation that had become the subject of multiple talks and left behind all others in their cruelity and blood-thirstiness, the so-called people of Rhos[1376] who besieged Constantinople several years earlier, became converted. They had also abandoned pagan beliefs and turned to the pure and unforged religion of the Christians. They had accepted a bishop and a preacher and they started to ardently practice Christian rituals[1377].

This passage of Photius is of cardinal importance. Not only the information it supplies but also the implications it suggests are of primary significance. First of all it states clearly that the Rhos people turned to Christianity and it was the same group of Rhos that launched the assault on Constantinople in 860 that became converted. If the identification of this group and the army of Askold and Dir is correct, it was the band of Vikings that made Kiev their stronghold and thus it was the first occasion when Christianity penetrated into the Middle Dnieper region[1378].