Kievan Rus

The Russian Primary Chronicle tells the conversion of Rus as a deliberate act of comparison. Vladimir, it says, received delegations from Islam, from Judaism, from the Latin west and from Byzantium, questioned each, sent his own envoys to observe their worship, and chose on the strength of what they reported, most famously that at the liturgy in Constantinople they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. The chronicle also has him reject Islam because of the prohibition on wine and dismiss Judaism because its people had lost their land. This is a literary construction written more than a century after the events, and the atlas records it as such: it is a story about why the choice was the right one, told by the winners, in a form that lets the writer set out the alternatives and dispose of them. That does not make the underlying facts doubtful.

Vladimir did accept Byzantine Christianity around 988, the political context of a Byzantine marriage alliance is well attested, and the consequences followed rapidly. The atlas therefore distinguishes the conversion, which is established, from the account of the deliberation, which is a later composition doing theological and political work.

The conversion brought a package with it. Liturgy in Slavonic rather than Greek, following the mission of Cyril and Methodius that Francis Dvornik traced in detail, meant that worship was conducted in a language the population could follow and that a literary culture developed in it. Byzantine church architecture, iconography and canon law arrived with the clergy. The Caves Monastery at Kiev, founded in the eleventh century, became the founding house of a monastic tradition and the source of much of the region's early writing, including the chronicle itself. What the atlas has to record carefully is who inherits this.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus each trace their Christianity to the baptism of Rus, and the claim is not a matter of antiquarian interest: it has been used in modern argument about the relationship between the churches and the states of the region, and it is contested at present. The atlas describes Kievan Rus as the shared origin that all three traditions cite and does not adjudicate between the readings built on it, because the question is live, the parties are operating institutions with a great deal at stake, and a reference work has no standing to settle it. What can be recorded without difficulty is the shared inheritance itself, which none of the three traditions disputes.