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Russia with the Byzantine empire and Bulgaria—is datedfrom the baptism in 988 of Vladimir, grand-prince ofKiev, a slavized Varangian war leader, the Russianequivalent of the king-saints Olaf of Norway and Stephenof Hungary. Immediately afterwards he married theemperor's sister and set about destroying paganism andintroducing Christianity both in Kiev and in the dependentRussian principalities, which his family, thedescendants of the Viking adventurer Rurik (d. about879), shared in ruling.For half a century before Vladimir, Kiev had knownChristianity, and known it as the religion of the rich andthe powerful. His grandmother, Olga, and variousindividual leaders had been converted, and relations withthe West had brought contacts with the Latins. Thesewere later multiplied despite religious subordination toConstantinople through the frequent marriages, untilthe thirteenth century, of the house of Rurik with thereigning families of the West, marriages that were muchmore numerous than those with Byzantine princesses.Russia was indeed in more general touch with Europeduring the eleventh and twelfth centuries than thereafteruntil the late fifteenth. Although 'the conversion ofRussia' took place at a time when the antagonism betweenPope and Patriarch was widening into a breach betweenthe western and eastern churches, for Russia the sharpcleavage between East and West was made rather by theMongol conquest than by the adoption of Christianityfrom Byzantium.Yet there was division, if not cleavage, in the earliercenturies. Russia, in contrast with the medieval West,knew no monastic orders, no canons regular, no friars,no crusades, no chivalry, no challenge by the spiritualpower of claims to supremacy by the secular power, andno philosophic or scientific inquiry. Orthodoxy as inheritedfrom Byzantium meant the preservation of whatwas already fixed, and the Russian church throughoutits history has been weak in theological and philosophicalcreativeness.As with the Roman missions to England four centuriesearlier, conversion was primarily an affair of the princesI75