The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Эдвард Гиббон

it follows that the marriage and conversion cannot have been celebrated before the autumn of 989. The fragment which is sometimes called “Notes of the Greek toparch of Gothia,” which was published by Hase (notes to Leo Diaconus, p. 496 sqq. ed. Bonn), does not belong to this period nor concern the neighbourhood of Cherson; but probably refers to events which happened on the lower Don in the early part of the 10th century. This explanation has been proposed by Th. Uspenski in the Kievskaia Starina of 1889 (see Schlumberger, L’épopée Byzantine, p. 767, note).]

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      [The adoption of Christianity in Russia was facilitated by the fact that there was no sacerdotal caste to oppose it. This point is insisted on by Kostomarov, Russische Geschichte in Biographien, i. 5.]

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      Consult the Latin text, or English version, of Mosheim’s excellent History of the Church, under the first head or section of each of these centuries.

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      In the year 1000, the ambassadors of St. Stephen received from Pope Sylvester the title of King of Hungary, with a diadem of Greek workmanship. It had been designed for the duke of Poland; but the Poles, by their own confession, were yet too barbarous to deserve an angelical and apostolical crown (Katona, Hist. Critic. Regum Stirpis Arpadianæ, tom. i. p. 1-20).

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      Listen to the exultations of Adam of Bremen (ad 1080), of which the substance is agreeable to truth: Ecce illa ferocissima Danorum, &c. natio . . . jamdudum novit in Dei laudibus Alleluia resonare . . . Ecce populus ille piraticus . . . suis nunc finibus contentus est. Ecce patria [illa] horribilis semper inaccessa propter cultum idolorum . . . prædicatores veritatis ubique certatim admittit, &c. &c. (de Situ Daniæ, &c. p. 40, 41, edit. Elzevir [c. 42]: a curious and original prospect of the North of Europe, and the introduction of Christianity).

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      [The great monument of Yaroslav’s reign is the church of St. Sophia at Kiev, built by Greek masons. A smaller church, also dedicated to the Holy Wisdom, was built at Novgorod on the pattern of the Kiev church by his son Vladimir in 1045.]

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      [For Yaroslav’s taste for books, see Nestor, c. 55.]

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      [It is important to notice the growth of monasticism in Russia in the 11th century. The original hearth and centre of the movement was at Kiev in the Pestcherski or Crypt Monastery, famous for the Saint Theodosius [ob. 1074] whose biography was written by Nestor. Kostomarov (op. cit. p. 18 sqq.) has a readable chapter on the subject.]

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      The great princes removed in 1156 from Kiow, which was ruined by the Tartars in 1240. Moscow became the seat of empire in the xivth century. See the first and second volumes of Levesque’s History, and Mr. Coxe’s Travels into the North, tom. i. p. 241, &c.

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      The ambassadors of St. Stephen had used the reverential expressions of regnum oblatum, debitam obedientiam, &c. which were most rigorously interpreted by Gregory VII.; and the Hungarian Catholics are distressed between the sanctity of the pope and the independence of the crown (Katona, Hist. Critica, tom. i. p. 20-25, tom. ii. p. 304, 346, 360, &c.).