Византийское миссионерство

It was a deadlock for mission: in order to convince people in whatever, you have to please them. Byzantines learned their lesson: it becomes obvious from our scrutiny of another crucial source, insufficiently used by scholars in this respect — letters of Constantinopolitan Patriarch Nicholas Mysticos (1 half of the 10^thC.). He instructs his missionaries to make tactical concessions to «barbaric» rulers — quite opposite to what Patriarch Photios insisted on in the previous century. The first success of the 10^thcentury was the conversion of Alania in the Northern Caucasus. Although it turned out to be not decisive and Alanian Christianity was uprooted soon for several decades, although a great role in this conversion was played by Abkhazian Orthodox church (a replay of the situation of Arabia — Ethiopia in the 6^thC.), still it is hard to overestimate the fact that Constantinopolitan Patriarchate finally won over this, absolutely «barbaric» area for itself for the next five hundred years.

In the middle of the 10^thcentury one more area was converted to Byzantine Christianity — Hungary. At the first stage, Magyar princes visited Constantinople for baptism and imperial gifts (we know this routine from the Early Byzantine period); at the second stage Greek clergy went there for everyday work. In the Hungarian case we have many archeological evidence which facilitate our understanding of the details of this work. Another source of our information is Christian vocabulary of Hungarian language. The majority of this vocabulary is of Slavic origin, which means that Greeks did not interfere much with the local population, relying more on the help of local Christian Slavs. Finally, Hungary defected from the Constantinopolitan realm to the Roman one.