Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (85 page)

Back in the Mediterranean, in 1601 Lucaris was elected Patriarch of the small Melchite (Chalcedonian) Orthodox Church of Alexandria, an honour which a cousin of his had held before him, and in 1612 he was elected Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, a tenure which was destined to be much interrupted and then brutally ended for political reasons. He became acquainted with a cultivated Dutch Reformed merchant and diplomat, Cornelius van Haga, and entered correspondence with one of the most respected leaders of international Reformed Protestantism, the Englishman George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose family was much involved in the growing English trade with the Ottoman Empire. The two archbishops so far apart in geography and background saw a common interest: the fight against Roman Catholicism. They even considered the possibility of a Church reunited against the common enemy.

Abbot brought Lucaris to the attention of his king, James VI and I of Scotland and England, who with some justification regarded himself as an international Protestant statesman. King James was keenly interested in the reunion of Christendom, and back in his youth he had written and eventually published an epic poem celebrating the Christian naval victory over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.
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With James's enthusiastic backing, the English government actually paid for a couple of Greek scholars to come and study in England, and one of them, Nathaniel Konopios, a fellow Cretan of Lucaris and future Metropolitan of Smyrna, is said to have drunk the first cup of coffee ever witnessed in the University of Oxford.
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Such was Lucaris's sympathy for Reformed Protestant theologians, among whom John Calvin has often been taken as a representative figure, that he was soon to be known, in no complimentary spirit, as the 'Calvinist patriarch'.
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That cup of coffee which Konopios drank in Oxford - precedent for the huge intellectual liveliness of London coffee houses over the next century and a half - was alas one of the few lasting legacies of Lucaris's patriarchate, apart from a great deal of ill-will. Lucaris was a deeply pastorally minded bishop, distressed by what he saw as the ignorance and superstition of his flock, and by the obvious decline of his own Church. In 1627 he reopened the moribund Academy in Constantinople, providing it with a printing press staffed by a Greek printer trained in London. Within a few months Catholic missionaries of the Society of Jesus organized a mob to sack the printing office, but Lucaris persisted, sponsoring a translation of the New Testament into modern Greek. In 1629, in an effort to produce a point of instruction for the Greek Orthodox faithful and to introduce them to what he saw as the treasures of Western theology in a synthesis with Orthodox tradition, Lucaris published a
Confession of Faith
, which among other topics expounded a version of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone and the Reformed development from it of predestination (see pp. 607-8 and 634). By now he had aroused a storm of opposition within his Church, much encouraged by the Jesuits, who sedulously presented him to the Ottoman authorities as a fifth columnist for foreign subversion; they spent a great deal of Rome's money in bribes to make the accusation stick. In 1638 the Patriarch was executed, condemned for supposedly encouraging Cossacks under Muscovite leadership to attack the empire. Relations between the Church of England and the Orthodox never completely lapsed after that, but neither did a pattern of opportunism born of political desperation on the Orthodox side, combined with a good deal of mutual theological incomprehension.
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Lucaris was one of those creative figures condemned to live at the wrong moment. His enemies fomented a poisonously anti-Protestant mood in the Orthodox Church, and the Jesuits sealed their triumph over Lucaris as Greek Orthodoxy moved closer to Roman Catholicism during the seventeenth century, encouraged by steady investment by the Catholic monarchy of France, both commercial intervention and discreet royal diplomatic support of Eastern Christians within the Ottoman domains (see p. 715). In the sixteenth century, while the Ottomans remained a vigorous and expansive military power, Western ability to intervene in the eastern Mediterranean remained limited. Military achievements against the Ottomans were largely defensive, such as the defence of the Knights Hospitallers' headquarters of Malta in 1565 and the subsequent victory at Lepanto led by Catholic Habsburg forces. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century, after the great symbolic reversal of Ottoman fortunes when the Sultan's armies were beaten back from Vienna by Polish and Habsburg forces in 1683, that the situation began to change. By that time, alongside the former crusading powers in the West, a new Orthodox empire had emerged north of the Ottoman frontier, and that would change the dynamic of world Christianity once more.

15

Russia: The Third Rome (900-1800)

A NEW THREAT TO CHRISTENDOM: NORSEMEN, RUS' AND KIEV (900-1240)

At the other extreme of ninth-century Europe from Constantinople, somewhere in southern England, perhaps at the Court of King Alfred of Wessex, a scribe sat puzzling his way through the task of translating into Anglo-Saxon a popular fifth-century Latin text about past world calamities: the
History against the Pagans
by Augustine of Hippo's Spanish admirer Paulus Orosius (see p. 305). Repeatedly in his text he found the concept of universal Christianity, and wondered how to translate it; he came up with a new Anglo-Saxon word, '
Cristendom
'.
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Our scribe was inventing a term which his readership could use to express their part in the universality of a continent-wide culture focused on Jesus Christ. It had survived repeated disasters: the scribe took comfort from the fact that Orosius's Christendom had not been extinguished despite the calamities which the Spanish priest had experienced, and in fact he made his translation more determinedly cheerful than the original. In Orosius's day, various barbarian peoples had dismantled the Christian Western Empire and sacked Rome itself; now the scribe's optimistic tone defied the fact that Wessex was facing new barbarians, apparently intent on destroying everything that Christendom meant for England. The perpetrators sailed across the North Sea from Scandinavia, and in England they were called Norsemen, Danes or Vikings. They murdered kings, raped nuns, torched monasteries - one of their tortured and butchered victims, King Edmund of East Anglia, became such a symbol of those terrible times that he was long regarded as England's patron saint.

Christendom from west to east was united in its suffering at the hands of these people. Far to the east, the people of Constantinople also encountered Norsemen or Vikings, but knew them by a different Scandinavian word: Rus' or Rhos.
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There too the word began as a name of terror; the Rus' were part of a single Scandinavian movement of restlessness, plunder and settlement which both sent the Norsemen to England and impelled these peoples into the plains of eastern Europe. They seem to have sailed there mainly from Sweden; among a variety of new settlements, they set up their headquarters far inland at a hilltop strategically sited beside a wide river. It was named in the local Slavic language Gorodishche, though to them it was Holmgardr; later the settlement which grew up nearby would be called the new city, or Novgorod.
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In 860 the Rus' streamed southwards and laid siege to Constantinople itself. That imaginative ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, Photios, has left vivid descriptions of the horror sparked in the capital by their unexpected arrival, their plundering of the suburbs, their wild appearance and unknown language.

Photios's reaction was characteristically far-sighted: he proposed a religious solution for a political problem. He laid plans for a Christian mission to the Rus', just as he did for the troublesome Khazars or the Bulgars and Slavs. In 869 his missionary bishop to the Rus' found time to attend the first of two councils of Orthodox bishops in Constantinople which (to the fury of papal delegates present) pressed the case for the Bulgarian Church's links to the Byzantine Church (see p. 460).
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Photios would have known that he was following a Western precedent. Earlier in the century, the English had also reached out to their Viking tormentors and tried to tame them by conversion; so did the Carolingian monarch Louis the Pious in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. Of all these missions, the English were the most successful. Neither the Carolingians nor Photios's delegates achieved lasting results, although the discovery of contemporary Byzantine coins in excavations at Gorodishche does show that money passed hands by some means, peaceful or otherwise.
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Nothing significant was heard of Christian activity in the lands of the Rus' for nearly another century, but the contacts between these remote regions and Byzantium grew and stabilized.

Norse power now spread hundreds of miles south from Gorodishche to the river system of the Dnieper, and in the mid-tenth century Norse leaders seized a settlement on the borders of the Khazar territories. It was at a confluence of rivers, and its easily defended hills were useful storage places for weapons and goods in transit: its name was Kiev or Ky'iv.
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Its rulers, a clan group known in later histories as Rurikids from their supposed ancestor Rurik, were by now losing their Norse identity and taking Slav names; they established a brisk trade with the Byzantine Empire, and their fascination with the riches which they could steal or barter from Byzantium began to familiarize them with the culture of the imperial world. The Macedonian emperors began including warriors from Rus' among the mercenaries whom they gathered to fight on their frontiers: the first recorded instance is from 935, even before Kiev was in Norse hands.
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Some objects recovered from Russian excavation layers datable to the tenth century are inscribed in Greek characters - informal scratches on pottery for the most part - but even more significantly, these finds are outnumbered by survivals of Cyrillic script - on pots, seals, tally sticks, sword blades.
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So the Rus' and their Slavonic-speaking subjects were in touch not merely with Greeks, but with Bulgarian Christians, who with the encouragement of their rulers were at this time creating a Christian literature in a language and script which could be understood far to the north of their own lands.

It was against this background of contacts increasingly more about trade and less about violent plunder that in 957 a Rurikid princess, Olga, paid a ceremonial visit to Constantinople from Kiev. She was currently regent for her son Sviatoslav and the purpose of her visit was to complete her conversion to Christianity by receiving baptism. With ostentatious symbolism, Olga took the Christian name Yelena, after the reigning Byzantine empress, Helena. Her visit was a moment for the Byzantines to savour, and the occasion was written up in loving detail by Helena's husband, the Emperor Constantine VII, in his manual of imperial Court ceremonial - with one curious omission: he forgot to describe the baptism. That silence suggests that the expectations of the Byzantines and Olga from the visit were not in step, and her subsequent action indicates disappointment. She turned to the powerful Latin Roman Emperor Otto I to supply an alternative Christian mission, presumably to put diplomatic pressure on Constantinople, but once more expectations do not seem to have matched, and Otto quickly became lukewarm about her overture. Her son was not impressed by her incomplete efforts and, once he was in full control of his dominions, would not follow her into Christianity.
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Sviatoslav had his own imperial ambitions, which led him to take an aggressive interest in the Christian khanate of Bulgaria. This brought him disaster. When Sviatoslav's armies overran Bulgaria, the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimisces reacted with his own invasion and annexation of Bulgaria, and the Rurikid prince died on his retreat homewards in 972.

Sviatoslav's son and successor, Vladimir, now had no choice but to come to terms with Constantinople's military success, yet the new intimacy between his world and theirs also gave him a chance to exploit the internal struggles of the Byzantine imperial family. When the young Basil II succeeded John Tzimisces in 976, Basil faced rivals for the throne, including his co-emperor, who was his younger brother. To secure his position, he turned to the Prince of Kiev for substantial troop reinforcements, trading a promise of marriage to his sister, the imperial Princess Anna - a transaction regarded as demeaning an emperor's lawfully born daughter, and actually forbidden in regulations drawn up by his grandfather Constantine VII. Otto II of Saxony had already failed to secure the same Anna as a wife, but this deal went ahead: Basil's throne was secured, thanks to his bodyguards from Rus'.
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The Byzantines continued to recruit elite warriors from the north, not merely from Rus' but directly from far-off Scandinavia; from the end of the tenth century, they referred to them as 'Varangians'. The name has often been wrongly back-projected on the first troublesome Norsemen who negotiated their way into Byzantine Christianity. The source of the confusion is the twelfth-century writer of the Kievan
Primary Chronicle
, who with little more to work on than a set of princely names from the remote past constructed much of the story of the first Rurikid princes, in an effort to tidy up the story of his people's reception of Christianity two centuries before his own time.
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Prince Vladimir was not going to let the remarkable and unprecedented gift of a Byzantine princess slip from him, and in 988, to reinforce his new alliance with the Emperor, he abruptly ordered the conversion of his people to Christianity, himself taking the baptismal name Basil (Vasilii in Russian) in allusion to his new brother-in-law. There is a well-known anecdote embedded in the
Primary Chronicle
that Vladimir hesitated not merely between adopting a Latin or a Greek form of Christianity, but between Islam and Judaism too, and that his envoys to Constantinople swayed the decision by reporting their awe and astonishment on entering the Great Church of Hagia Sophia: 'We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or earth.' Given the political circumstances, it is unlikely that Vladimir had any real hesitation in his Orthodox baptism, but it is a satisfying story for Orthodox Russia, rather reminiscent of the self-congratulatory foundation tale which the Anglo-Saxons told about Pope Gregory the Great and his English slave-boys (see p. 336). And it does sum up two truths: Byzantine Christian culture had created the single most magnificent building in the European and West Asian world, and Kiev was now enthralled by Byzantine Christian culture. The feeling was not then reciprocated; Byzantine chroniclers are notably silent about the conversion of Vladimir and his imperial marriage, which they probably regarded as deeply demeaning for the dynasty.
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