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and their retainers, but there was until the mid-fourteenthcentury little that was comparable to the Celticmissionary work which contributed so much to thechristianizing of Anglo-Saxon England. Little organizedresistance was encountered from paganism, since theSlav tribes had no common cult nor any solid equivalentto a priesthood, so that there was no powerful vestedinterest hostile to the new religion. The mass of thepopulation, however, even when nominally Christian, forlong retained their old customs and beliefs. Sorcery,magic, witchcraft, and omens still held sway almost asstrongly, it appears, in the sixteenth century as in thethirteenth, when a church council (1274) had to insistthat no one should be ordained priest who had previouslypractised sorcery.The organization and practices of the church inevitablyfollowed those of Constantinople, of which it was adependency, although there were considerable divergencesowing to the great size and remoteness of the countryand its very different social and political structure. Whilethe newly arrived hierarchy were accustomed to strictmonarchical rule and political centralization, they foundneither in Kiev Russia. They were too few to attemptto remould the political fabric and in the main theycontented themselves with struggling against the worstabuses, especially the internecine feuds of the princes,by exhortation and spiritual penalties, though the weaponof excommunication was not often used against theprinces (see also p. 88).The metropolitan of Kiev, appointed by and underthe jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople, wasprimate of the church, from 1037 onwards. The bishops,on the other hand, were appointed by the local princes(in Novgorod by the town assembly after 1156), butconsecrated by the metropolitan. At first Greeks, theywere soon for the most part chosen from Russians. Incontrast, the metropolitans were for two hundred yearsall Greeks, with three disputed exceptions. In the nexttwo centuries (1238-1448) the Patriarch was less successfulin resisting the claims of the grand-princes and thecouncil of Russian bishops, but even so out of the ten176