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Individual:
Vladimir I, in full VLADIMIR SVYATOSLAVICH, byname SAINT VLADIMIR, or VLADIMIR THE GREAT, Russian SVYATOY VLADIMIR, or VLADIMIR VELIKY (b. c. 956, Kiev, Kievan Rus [now in Ukraine]--d. July 15, 1015, Berestova, near Kiev; feast day July 15), 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 youngest son of the Norman-Rus prince Svyatoslav I and his mistress Malushka, 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 Svyatoslav in 972, a long civil war took place between his sons Yaropolk and Oleg, in which Vladimir was involved. Yaropolk attempted to seize the duchy of Novgorod as well as Kiev. Vladimir was forced to flee to Scandinavia, where he enlisted help from an uncle. From 977 to 984 while in Scandinavia, he collected as many of the Viking warriors as he could to assist him recover Novgorod. On his way to Kiev he sent ambassadors to Ragnvald, prince of Polotsk, to sue for the hand of his daughter Ragnilda. The haughty princess refused to affiance herself to "the son of a bondswoman," but Vladimir attacked Polotsk, slew Ragnvald and took Ragnilda by force.
On his return, he marched against Yaropolk. In 980, he captured Kiev, slew Yaropolk by treachery, and was proclaimed prince of all Russia. In 981 he conquered the Chervensk cities, the modern Galicia; in 983 he subdued the heathen Yatvyags, whose territories lay between Lithuania and Poland; in 985 he led a fleet along the central rivers of Russia to conquer the Bulgars of the Kama, planting numerous fortresses and colonies on his way. At this time Vladimir was a thoroughgoing pagan. He increased the number of the trebishcha or heathen temples; offered up Christians (Theodore and Ivan, the protomartyrs of the Russian church) on his altars; he had 800 concubines, besides numerous wives; and spent his whole leisure in feasting and hunting. He also formed a great council out of his boyars, and set his 12 sons over his subject principalities.
Although Christianity in Kiev existed before Vladimir's time, he had remained a pagan, accumulated about seven wives, established temples, and, it is said, had taken part in idolatrous rites involving human sacrifice. In the year 987, as the result of a consultation with his boyars, Vladimir sent envoys to study the religions of the various neighbouring nations whose representatives had been urging him to embrace their respective faiths. The result is amusingly described by the chronicler Nestor. Of the Moslem Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported "there is no gladness among them; only sorrow and a great stench; their religion is not a good one." In the temples of the Germans they saw "no beauty"; but at Constantinople, where the full festival ritual of the Orthodox Church was set in motion to impress them, they found their ideal. "We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth, nor such beauty, and we know not how to tell of it." [This 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 that of the Germans.]
With insurrections troubling Byzantium, the emperor Basil II (976-1025) sought military aid from Vladimir. Vladimir was impressed by the offer of the emperor to give him his sister Anna in marriage, and agreed. A pact was reached between them about 987, when Vladimir also consented to the condition that he become a Christian. In 988 he was baptized at Kherson in the Crimea, taking the Christian name of Basil out of compliment to his imperial brother-in-law; the sacrament was followed by his marriage with the Roman princess.
Vladimir ordered the Christian conversion of Kiev and Novgorod, where idols were cast into the Dnieper River after local resistance had been suppressed. While crypto-Christians had been numerous in Kiev for some time before the public recognition of the Orthodox faith, the new Rus Christian worship adopted the Byzantine rite in the Old Church Slavonic language. 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 splendid Desyatinnuy Sobor or "Cathedral of the Tithes" in Kiev (designed by Byzantine architects and dedicated about 996) that became the symbol of the Rus conversion. The remainder of his reign was devoted to good works and he also expanded education, judicial institutions, aid to the poor, and introduced ecclesiastical courts.
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 extended the realm to include the watersheds of the Don, Dnieper, Dniester, Neman, Western Dvina, and upper Volga, destroyed or incorporated the remnants of competing Varangian organizations, and established relations with neighbouring dynasties, consolidating the Kievan realm from Ukraine to the Baltic Sea and solidified the frontiers against incursions of Bulgarian, Baltic, and Eastern nomads. With his neighbours he lived at peace, the incursions of the savage Pechenegs alone disturbing his tranquility. His nephew Svyatpolk, son of his brother and victim Yaropolk, he married to the daughter of Boleslaus of Poland. He died at Berestova, near Kiev, while on his way to chastise the insolence of his son, Prince Yaroslav of Novgorod. The various parts of his dismembered body were distributed among his numerous sacred foundations and were venerated as relics. The University of Kiev has rightly been named after the man who both civilized and Christianized ancient Russia. His memory was also kept alive by innumerable folk ballads and legends. With him the Varangian period of Russian history ceases and the Christian period begins.
The successes of Vladimir's long reign made it possible for the reign of his son Yaroslav (ruled 1019-54) to produce a flowering of cultural life. But neither Yaroslav, who gained control of Kiev only after a bitter struggle against his brother Svyatopolk (1015-19), nor his successors in Kiev were able to provide lasting political stability within the enormous realm. The political history of Rus is one of clashing separatist and centralizing trends inherent in the contradiction between local settlement and colonization, on the one hand, and the hegemony of the clan elder, ruling from Kiev, on the other. As Vladimir's 12 sons and innumerable grandsons prospered in the rapidly developing territories they inherited, they and their retainers acquired settled interests that conflicted both with one another and with the interests of unity. [Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1961 ed., Vol. 23, pp. 229-30, VLADIMIR I; Encyclopaedia Britannica CD '97, VLADIMIR I; Encyclopaedia Britannica CD '97, RURIK DYNASTY]
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