The Byzantine Empire's influence reached far beyond its borders. Through missionaries, diplomats, marriages and trade, it spread Christianity, writing and culture to the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, shaping the civilizations of Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Cyril and Methodius
In 863, the ruler of Great Moravia, a Slavic state in central Europe, asked the emperor to send teachers who could explain Christianity in the Slavic language. The emperor sent two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine (later known as Cyril) and Methodius, who had grown up knowing a Slavic dialect. Before setting out, Constantine created an alphabet for the Slavic language, now called Glagolitic, and the brothers translated the gospels and church services into Slavonic.
This was a bold step. Many Western clergy insisted that the liturgy could be celebrated only in Hebrew, Greek or Latin, the three languages written on Christ's cross. Cyril and Methodius argued that every people should be able to worship in its own language. Their mission in Moravia eventually failed in the face of opposition from German clergy, but their disciples carried their work to Bulgaria.
Cyrillic
In Bulgaria, whose ruler Boris had accepted Christianity from Constantinople in the 860s, the disciples of Cyril and Methodius flourished. There, probably in the late ninth or early tenth century, a new alphabet based mainly on Greek letters was developed. It was named Cyrillic in honor of Cyril, though he did not invent it himself. Cyrillic is used today by over 250 million people, for Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian and other languages. Old Church Slavonic, the language of their translations, became the shared literary and religious language of the Orthodox Slavic world.
Bulgaria: rival and partner
Bulgaria was both a student of Byzantium and its most dangerous neighbor. Under Tsar Simeon in the early tenth century, Bulgaria challenged the empire for supremacy in the Balkans. The struggle lasted generations and ended only when the emperor Basil II conquered Bulgaria in 1018, as Level 6 will describe.
The conversion of the Rus
To the north lay the lands of the Rus, a state centered on Kyiv (Kiev), founded by Scandinavian traders and warriors ruling over Slavic peoples. The Rus traded with Constantinople, which they called Tsargrad, “the city of the emperor,” and sometimes attacked it.
The Russian Primary Chronicle, written in the twelfth century, tells how Prince Vladimir of Kyiv decided which religion to adopt. He sent envoys to observe the worship of Muslims, Jews, Latin Christians and Greek Christians. The envoys who attended a service in Hagia Sophia reported that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth, for there was no such beauty anywhere on earth. The story is probably legendary, but it captures the power of Byzantine worship.
The real reasons were also political. Around 988, Vladimir sent troops to help the emperor Basil II put down a rebellion. In return, Basil agreed to let Vladimir marry his sister Anna, an extraordinary honor, since Byzantine princesses rarely married foreigners. Vladimir was baptized and ordered the baptism of the people of Kyiv in the Dnieper River. Orthodox Christianity became the faith of the Rus. Today Ukraine, Belarus and Russia all trace their Christian origins to this event.
The Varangian Guard
The troops Vladimir sent formed the core of a famous elite unit, the Varangian Guard, the emperor's personal bodyguard, made up of Scandinavian and Rus warriors, later joined by Anglo-Saxons who left England after the Norman Conquest. They were known for their loyalty to whichever emperor paid them and for their axes. Runic graffiti carved by a Varangian can still be seen on a balustrade in Hagia Sophia.
Byzantine diplomacy
The empire became famous for its diplomacy. It impressed foreign envoys with ceremony; one tenth century Western ambassador, Liudprand of Cremona, described a throne room where mechanical golden lions roared and the emperor's throne rose into the air. It paid subsidies to allies, played enemies against each other, and offered titles, gifts and marriages. Critics in the West later called this deceitful; defenders note that it often achieved through negotiation what would otherwise have cost lives in war.
Worked example: language and access
Consider the significance of worship in one's own language through two cases.
- Latin in the West. In Western Europe, church services remained in Latin for centuries, a language most ordinary people did not understand. Reading scripture often required clergy as interpreters.
- Slavonic in the East. Thanks to Cyril and Methodius, Slavic peoples heard services and read scripture in a language close to their own, encouraging literacy and the growth of national literatures.
The question, whether people should have access to sacred and important knowledge in their own language, returned during the Reformation, when Luther translated the Bible into German, and it returns today in debates about translating laws, ballots and medical information. The brothers from Thessalonica argued, more than a thousand years ago, that no people should be shut out of understanding by language alone.