Impact Of Conversion To Christianity On Kievan Rus

1. Evaluate the impact of conversion to Christianity on Kievan Rus.
The conversion of the Kievan people to the Christianity took place when the rivalry between Constantinople and Rome on converting pagan peoples in the northern Europe reached its peak in the tenth century. Although the breakup of two churches happened in 1054, the Russian allegiance to Byzantium helped to determine much of the subsequent history of the country. The Prince of Kiev, Saint Vladimir Svyatoslavich, the baptizer of the Russians, adopted the Christianity in 988 according to the Primary Chronicle. This decision by Prince Vladimir was the result of a process of heightened activity by missionary monks and priests from Byzantium among the Slavs as well as increased military,
As always happens, conversion to one religion comes with a huge transformation of cultural values from the converter to the converted. In the example of the Eastern Slavs, this resulted with the highly developed Byzantine intense influence on cultural and ideological affairs. The primary area of this effect was the alphabet. The Germanic tribes who came into contact with the Latins adopted the Latin alphabet, the Persians took the Arabic scripture, and the Khazars, the Jewish one. Although in the case of the Russian conversion something different happened in terms of alphabet, the effect of the conversion on the literature was immense. Despite the Kievan Slavs accepted the Christianity with the influence of the Byzantines, they did not adopted the Greek alphabet directly. Yet they adopted the fiction alphabet which was invented by two Byzantine churchmen, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius for the Slavic people. Before the conversion the Eastern Slavs had a very rich oral literature, written literature and writing itself came essentially with the conversion.
The existence of the Byzantine Empire or Eastern Roman Empire and the Orthodox Patriarchate was the same, the transmission of non-religious elements to the Russian culture with the religious elements did not pose much problem from the part of the latter since the Roman Empire was Orthodox Christian itself. However, the fall of Constantinople into the Muslim hands changed this relationship of trainer and trainee. The supremacy of the Patriarchy in Constantinople was cast into shadow with the Muslim overlordship. Russian Orthodox Church became the most important of all the Orthodox churches de facto, since it was now by far the strongest in numbers and was also now the only one that enjoyed the backing of a powerful sovereign state. Therefore, the status of primus inter pares of the Patriarchate in Constantinople did not mean much in fact. The situation that the Russia was the only independent Orthodox empire at that time, eventually led the development of the Third Rome theory. The monk Theophilus of Pskov writes: “The Church of Old Rome fell because of its heresy, the gates of the Second Rome, Constantinople, have been hewn down by the axes of the infidel Turks; but the Church of Moscow, the Church of the New