was the grand prince of Kiev and first Christian ruler in Kievan Rus, whose military conquests
consolidated the provinces of Kiev and Novgorod into a single state, and whose Byzantine
baptism determined the course of Christianity in the region.
Vladimir was the son of the Norman-Rus prince Svyatoslav of Kiev by one of his courtesans and
was a member of the Rurik lineage dominant from the 10th to the 13th century. He was made
prince of Novgorod in 970. On the death of his father in 972, he was forced to flee to
Scandinavia, where he enlisted help from an uncle and overcame Yaropolk, another son of
Svyatoslav, who attempted to seize the duchy of Novgorod as well as Kiev. By 980 Vladimir had
consolidated the Kievan realm from Ukraine to the Baltic Sea and had solidified the frontiers
against incursions of Bulgarian, Baltic, and Eastern nomads.
Although Christianity in Kiev existed before Vladimir's time, he had remained a pagan,
accumulated about seven wives, established temples, and, it is said, taken part in idolatrous rites
involving human sacrifice. With insurrections troubling Byzantium, the emperor Basil II
(976-1025) sought military aid from Vladimir, who agreed, in exchange for Basil's sister Anne in
marriage. A pact was reached about 987, when Vladimir also consented to the condition that he
become a Christian. Having undergone baptism, assuming the Christian patronal name Basil, he
stormed the Byzantine area of Chersonesus (Korsun, now part of Sevastopol) to eliminate
Constantinople's final reluctance. Vladimir then ordered the Christian conversion of Kiev and
Novgorod, where idols were cast into the Dnieper River after local resistance had been
suppressed. The new Rus Christian worship adopted the Byzantine rite in the Old Church
Slavonic language. The story (deriving from the 11th-century monk Jacob) that Vladimir chose
the Byzantine rite over the liturgies of German Christendom, Judaism, and Islam because of its
transcendent beauty is apparently mythically symbolic of his determination to remain
independent of external political control, particularly of the Germans. The Byzantines, however,
maintained ecclesiastical control over the new Rus church, appointing a Greek metropolitan, or
archbishop, for Kiev, who functioned both as legate of the patriarch of Constantinople and of the
emperor. The Rus-Byzantine religio-political integration checked the influence of the Roman
Latin church in the Slavic East and determined the course of Russian Christianity, although Kiev
exchanged legates with the papacy. Among the churches erected by Vladimir was the
Desyatinnaya in Kiev (designed by Byzantine architects and dedicated about 996) that became
the symbol of the Rus conversion. The Christian Vladimir also expanded education, judicial
institutions, and aid to the poor.
Another marriage, following the death of Anne (1011), affiliated Vladimir with the Holy Roman
emperors of the German Ottonian dynasty and produced a daughter, who became the consort of
Casimir I the Restorer of Poland (1016-58). Vladimir's memory was kept alive by innumerable
folk ballads and legends.
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