By Audra Yoder
Central and southeastern Europe in the ninth century was a convoluted mess. (Actually, I have difficulty recalling a period when southeastern Europe wasn’t hopelessly confusing. To me, it still is.)
Anyway, the Byzantine Empire was in the middle of a resurgence under the Macedonian dynasty. Its emperors were able politicians for once, arts and culture were flourishing after the iconoclastic controversy had died down, and the empire was in the process of winning back lands it had lost to Muslim Arab incursions.
Meanwhile, north of Byzantium, and taking up rather more territory, the Khazar kaganate was at its zenith. The Khazars controlled the most powerful steppe empire of the period, and ran one of the most successful trading conglomerates in the medieval world. The Khazars were a Turkic people; interestingly, pretty much all their high leadership converted to Ashkenazy Judaism at the beginning of the ninth century, and following this, the kaganate became one of the earliest states to practice religious toleration: under their leadership, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all lived together in peace.
Meanwhile, further north still, an amorphous mass of East Slavic tribes was in the process of transforming itself into something that would ultimately become Russia. The semi-legendary Norse princeling Rurik settled in Novgorod in 862, and the Rurikid dynasty he founded would rule Rus′, and later Muscovy, until the early seventeenth century. [1] Rurik’s descendant prince Oleg would seize Kiev in 878, and open up the Black Sea for East Slavic trade.
Meanwhile, in Central Europe, the West Slavic state of Great Moravia was in full swing. Under rulers Rastislav and Svatopulk I, Moravia achieved its greatest geographic size in the ninth century, controlling Bohemian, Hungarian, Polish, and Czech territories. This little empire was busily trying to disentangle itself from the more powerful Germanic and Frankish kings to its west.
Back in Byzantium, or more specifically, in the Greek city of Thessalonica, two brothers, Constantine and Michael, lost their father when Constantine was only fourteen. The boys came under the protection of a powerful Byzantine official, who provided them with a first-rate education.
Constantine, who would take the name Cyril upon becoming a monk, was ordained to the priesthood after he completed his education, and because of his knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, was sent over to debate the concept of the Trinity with Muslim theologians. He became the unofficial head of Byzantine interfaith relations, engaging in fierce polemics with the Jewish aristocracy of the Khazar kaganate. Cyril even traveled to Khazaria in an attempt to stop the spread of Judaism there, but his mission failed, and the kagan subsequently imposed that religion on the entire population.
After this, Cyril did the only reasonable thing: he returned to Constantinople and settled into a comfortable teaching job at the University. This plan was shattered in 862, however, when Rastislav of Moravia, more for political than religious reasons, requested that Byzantine missionaries be sent up to evangelize his West Slavic subjects. This was a power play, pure and simple—involvement with Constantinople, in the form of the religious edification of a few thousand Slavs, would help him assert his independence from the Franks.
To the Byzantines, this looked like a convenient opportunity to expand their influence further west: the cultural rift between Rome and Constantinople that would lead to the Great Schism a couple centuries later was already widening. Cyril was the obvious choice for an emissary, and in 863 he and his younger brother Michael, better known by his monastic name, Methodius, took the rational first step of beginning to translate the Bible into the Slavic vernacular. Before they could do so, they needed to invent an alphabet for the Slavs, who previous to this had no written language—and the Glagolithic alphabet was born. [2]
Cyril and Methodius seem to have used their native Greek alphabet as a model, and fitted the letters to Macedonian Slavic, which was a dialect of Old Bulgarian. The alphabet had 41 letters, including letters for non-Greek sounds invented by Cyril. The letters also had numeric values after the Greek fashion. Though the letters were based on Greek, the brothers seemingly went a little crazy with the design, adding all kinds of curlicues and ligatures that would eventually be dropped. (As anyone who has worked with early Russian manuscripts knows, each letter had a maddening number of variations that changed according to the whim of whatever scribe was copying them.)
The written language pioneered by Cyril and Methodius—known to their Slavic brethren as Kirill and Mefodii—was Old Church Slavonic, the literary language of Kievan Rus′ and Muscovy down to the seventeenth century, when the Rurikid dynasty died out. The alphabet underwent significant changes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when it began to fragment into a wealth of local variations. At this point the Glagolithic alphabet was more or less obsolete, and had been replaced by what is still known as the Cyrillic alphabet, named of course after Cyril. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modern Russian began to diverge more and more from Church Slavonic. Peter the Great simplified the alphabet in the early eighteenth century, and in the early twentieth, the newly minted Soviet administration made some changes of its own.
Cyril died on February 14, 869. Crowds lining the streets at his funeral in Rome called for his canonization. He was interred at the Basilica of St. Clement, whose relics the brothers had brought back to Rome from Kherson. Methodius continued his work amongst the Slavs alone, and was consecrated Archbishop of Moravia in the early 870s. For the remainder of his life, Methodius was caught up in political struggles between the Pope, the Germans, and Byzantium. He died in 885.
The rest, as they say, is mythology. The forces that determined the movements of Cyril and Methodius
throughout their lives were entirely political—insofar as the political could be divorced from the religious in those days—but since then, not surprisingly, both the Orthodox, and later the Catholic, Churches have tended to gloss over the worldly and emphasize the saintly.
Cyril and Methodius are popularly remembered as “the apostles to the Slavs,” although many of the Slavic groups amongst whom they ministered had been exposed to Christianity centuries before their arrival. Bulgaria was Christianized in the 860s, possibly due in part to their influence, and this may have had some impact on other Slavs to the north and east.
According to the early Bulgarian chronicles, the holy brothers’ feast day was celebrated as early as the eleventh century. Rus′, now a loose confederation of competing East Slavic principalities centered around Kiev, had Christians amongst the members of the ruling family by the middle of the tenth century, under the tutelage of Byzantine priests. The rest of the population was forcibly and imperfectly Christianized in 988. Both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state consider that year the date of their founding.
The “Baptism of Rus′,” as it is often called, was made possible to a significant degree by the availability of parts of the Bible in Slavonic and a complete, Pope-authorized Slavonic liturgy. The first Slavic priests had been ordained at Rome sometime before the death of Methodius. The development of Slavic Christianity also contributed to the distinctive shape of Russian culture. It is hardly necessary to mention that alignment with Byzantium rather than Rome had the profoundest consequences for the course of Russian history.
The Russian Orthodox Church elected its own Patriarch and became autocephalous in 1448. In the seventeenth century, depending on whose point of view you adopt, the distinctiveness of the Slavic liturgy would turn around and stab Russia in the back. By then, centuries of imperfect copying and the slow march of cultural evolution had created a wide gap between Muscovite and Byzantine liturgical practice. Seeking to “correct” these “errors” and get closer to the Greek “original,” Patriarch Nikon instituted a number of reforms that led to a schism between the “Old Believers” and the mainline Church, destabilizing Muscovite society at a crucial point in its development. Hundreds if not thousands of faithful Russians decided they would rather die than cross themselves with three fingers instead of two.
But that is a story for another post. It is demonstrative of the Russocentrism that has dominated the history of Eastern Europe and Eurasia that Cyril and Methodius are today remembered principally as the saints who paved the way for the Christianization of Russia and the foundation of the Russian Orthodox Church. Despite the political nature of the forces that shaped their lives, Cyril and Methodius can certainly be credited as playing a significant role in Christianity’s taking root amongst the Slavs.
[1] Actually, there is a long-standing debate amongst historians and archaeologists over whether Rurik was of Finno-Ugric or Scandinavian heritage—either way, it seems clear that a marauding band of Norsemen somehow found itself in charge of the Eastern Slavs by the end of the ninth century.
[2] The name “Glagolithic” was not coined until centuries later, and comes from the Slavic word glagol′, meaning “utterance,” and which is also the name for the Slavic letter G (г). Glagol′ means “verb” in modern Russian.
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| Mural painting of Cyril & Methodius by Zahari Zograf (1810–1853) [Troyan Monastery, Bulgaria] |
I. A Tale of Four Empires
Central and southeastern Europe in the ninth century was a convoluted mess. (Actually, I have difficulty recalling a period when southeastern Europe wasn’t hopelessly confusing. To me, it still is.)
Anyway, the Byzantine Empire was in the middle of a resurgence under the Macedonian dynasty. Its emperors were able politicians for once, arts and culture were flourishing after the iconoclastic controversy had died down, and the empire was in the process of winning back lands it had lost to Muslim Arab incursions.
Meanwhile, north of Byzantium, and taking up rather more territory, the Khazar kaganate was at its zenith. The Khazars controlled the most powerful steppe empire of the period, and ran one of the most successful trading conglomerates in the medieval world. The Khazars were a Turkic people; interestingly, pretty much all their high leadership converted to Ashkenazy Judaism at the beginning of the ninth century, and following this, the kaganate became one of the earliest states to practice religious toleration: under their leadership, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all lived together in peace.
Meanwhile, further north still, an amorphous mass of East Slavic tribes was in the process of transforming itself into something that would ultimately become Russia. The semi-legendary Norse princeling Rurik settled in Novgorod in 862, and the Rurikid dynasty he founded would rule Rus′, and later Muscovy, until the early seventeenth century. [1] Rurik’s descendant prince Oleg would seize Kiev in 878, and open up the Black Sea for East Slavic trade.
Meanwhile, in Central Europe, the West Slavic state of Great Moravia was in full swing. Under rulers Rastislav and Svatopulk I, Moravia achieved its greatest geographic size in the ninth century, controlling Bohemian, Hungarian, Polish, and Czech territories. This little empire was busily trying to disentangle itself from the more powerful Germanic and Frankish kings to its west.
Back in Byzantium, or more specifically, in the Greek city of Thessalonica, two brothers, Constantine and Michael, lost their father when Constantine was only fourteen. The boys came under the protection of a powerful Byzantine official, who provided them with a first-rate education.
Constantine, who would take the name Cyril upon becoming a monk, was ordained to the priesthood after he completed his education, and because of his knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, was sent over to debate the concept of the Trinity with Muslim theologians. He became the unofficial head of Byzantine interfaith relations, engaging in fierce polemics with the Jewish aristocracy of the Khazar kaganate. Cyril even traveled to Khazaria in an attempt to stop the spread of Judaism there, but his mission failed, and the kagan subsequently imposed that religion on the entire population.
After this, Cyril did the only reasonable thing: he returned to Constantinople and settled into a comfortable teaching job at the University. This plan was shattered in 862, however, when Rastislav of Moravia, more for political than religious reasons, requested that Byzantine missionaries be sent up to evangelize his West Slavic subjects. This was a power play, pure and simple—involvement with Constantinople, in the form of the religious edification of a few thousand Slavs, would help him assert his independence from the Franks.
To the Byzantines, this looked like a convenient opportunity to expand their influence further west: the cultural rift between Rome and Constantinople that would lead to the Great Schism a couple centuries later was already widening. Cyril was the obvious choice for an emissary, and in 863 he and his younger brother Michael, better known by his monastic name, Methodius, took the rational first step of beginning to translate the Bible into the Slavic vernacular. Before they could do so, they needed to invent an alphabet for the Slavs, who previous to this had no written language—and the Glagolithic alphabet was born. [2]
Cyril and Methodius seem to have used their native Greek alphabet as a model, and fitted the letters to Macedonian Slavic, which was a dialect of Old Bulgarian. The alphabet had 41 letters, including letters for non-Greek sounds invented by Cyril. The letters also had numeric values after the Greek fashion. Though the letters were based on Greek, the brothers seemingly went a little crazy with the design, adding all kinds of curlicues and ligatures that would eventually be dropped. (As anyone who has worked with early Russian manuscripts knows, each letter had a maddening number of variations that changed according to the whim of whatever scribe was copying them.)
The written language pioneered by Cyril and Methodius—known to their Slavic brethren as Kirill and Mefodii—was Old Church Slavonic, the literary language of Kievan Rus′ and Muscovy down to the seventeenth century, when the Rurikid dynasty died out. The alphabet underwent significant changes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when it began to fragment into a wealth of local variations. At this point the Glagolithic alphabet was more or less obsolete, and had been replaced by what is still known as the Cyrillic alphabet, named of course after Cyril. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modern Russian began to diverge more and more from Church Slavonic. Peter the Great simplified the alphabet in the early eighteenth century, and in the early twentieth, the newly minted Soviet administration made some changes of its own.
Cyril died on February 14, 869. Crowds lining the streets at his funeral in Rome called for his canonization. He was interred at the Basilica of St. Clement, whose relics the brothers had brought back to Rome from Kherson. Methodius continued his work amongst the Slavs alone, and was consecrated Archbishop of Moravia in the early 870s. For the remainder of his life, Methodius was caught up in political struggles between the Pope, the Germans, and Byzantium. He died in 885.
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| Detail of miniature of Cyril & Methodius from the "Radzivill Chronicle" (15th c., East Slavic) |
II. The Apostles to the Slavs
The rest, as they say, is mythology. The forces that determined the movements of Cyril and Methodius
throughout their lives were entirely political—insofar as the political could be divorced from the religious in those days—but since then, not surprisingly, both the Orthodox, and later the Catholic, Churches have tended to gloss over the worldly and emphasize the saintly.
Cyril and Methodius are popularly remembered as “the apostles to the Slavs,” although many of the Slavic groups amongst whom they ministered had been exposed to Christianity centuries before their arrival. Bulgaria was Christianized in the 860s, possibly due in part to their influence, and this may have had some impact on other Slavs to the north and east.
According to the early Bulgarian chronicles, the holy brothers’ feast day was celebrated as early as the eleventh century. Rus′, now a loose confederation of competing East Slavic principalities centered around Kiev, had Christians amongst the members of the ruling family by the middle of the tenth century, under the tutelage of Byzantine priests. The rest of the population was forcibly and imperfectly Christianized in 988. Both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state consider that year the date of their founding.
The “Baptism of Rus′,” as it is often called, was made possible to a significant degree by the availability of parts of the Bible in Slavonic and a complete, Pope-authorized Slavonic liturgy. The first Slavic priests had been ordained at Rome sometime before the death of Methodius. The development of Slavic Christianity also contributed to the distinctive shape of Russian culture. It is hardly necessary to mention that alignment with Byzantium rather than Rome had the profoundest consequences for the course of Russian history.
The Russian Orthodox Church elected its own Patriarch and became autocephalous in 1448. In the seventeenth century, depending on whose point of view you adopt, the distinctiveness of the Slavic liturgy would turn around and stab Russia in the back. By then, centuries of imperfect copying and the slow march of cultural evolution had created a wide gap between Muscovite and Byzantine liturgical practice. Seeking to “correct” these “errors” and get closer to the Greek “original,” Patriarch Nikon instituted a number of reforms that led to a schism between the “Old Believers” and the mainline Church, destabilizing Muscovite society at a crucial point in its development. Hundreds if not thousands of faithful Russians decided they would rather die than cross themselves with three fingers instead of two.
But that is a story for another post. It is demonstrative of the Russocentrism that has dominated the history of Eastern Europe and Eurasia that Cyril and Methodius are today remembered principally as the saints who paved the way for the Christianization of Russia and the foundation of the Russian Orthodox Church. Despite the political nature of the forces that shaped their lives, Cyril and Methodius can certainly be credited as playing a significant role in Christianity’s taking root amongst the Slavs.
[1] Actually, there is a long-standing debate amongst historians and archaeologists over whether Rurik was of Finno-Ugric or Scandinavian heritage—either way, it seems clear that a marauding band of Norsemen somehow found itself in charge of the Eastern Slavs by the end of the ninth century.
[2] The name “Glagolithic” was not coined until centuries later, and comes from the Slavic word glagol′, meaning “utterance,” and which is also the name for the Slavic letter G (г). Glagol′ means “verb” in modern Russian.
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