The Life
Vladimir was born about 958, the youngest son of Prince Sviatoslav of Kiev. His mother Malusha was the housekeeper of his grandmother Saint Olga (the first Christian ruler of Rus, baptized in Constantinople about 957). Vladimir himself was raised pagan. After his father\'s death in 972, civil war broke out among Sviatoslav\'s three sons. Vladimir fled to Scandinavia and returned with a Varangian army; by 980 he had killed his brother Yaropolk and taken the throne of Kiev, ruling all of Rus from the Baltic to the Black Sea. As a pagan prince he was famously violent and lustful: seven wives and eight hundred concubines according to the chronicle, multiple human sacrifices to the gods Perun and Veles, an iron-handed conqueror who extended his realm by force. But the Lord prepared him for another work. About 986 missionaries from various religions came to Kiev seeking his conversion: Muslim Bulgars, Khazar Jews, German Latin Christians, Byzantine Greek Orthodox. Vladimir investigated each. He sent envoys to observe each religion in its homeland. The envoys returned and reported. Of the Greek Orthodox liturgy in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople they said: We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. Vladimir chose Orthodoxy. The political conditions of the choice were complex: he negotiated his baptism with the Byzantine emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII as part of a marriage alliance to their sister Anna Porphyrogenita, the first time a Byzantine princess born in the purple had ever been given to a foreign ruler. Vladimir was baptized in 988 (with the Christian name Basil), married Anna, and undertook the Baptism of Rus by gathering the people of Kiev to the banks of the Dnieper for corporate baptism. From this moment Russian Orthodox Christianity began. Vladimir spent his remaining twenty-seven years building churches, establishing schools, providing systematic charity to the poor, and integrating Christianity into the foundations of the Russian state. He died July 15, 1015. The Russian Church venerates him as Equal-to-the-Apostles, alongside Saints Constantine, Helena, and the Cyril-Methodian missionaries to the Slavs. He is the founder of all subsequent Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Christianity.
His mother was her housekeeper. He grew up pagan, fought his brothers for the throne, and won. Vladimir\'s family was the leading Russian princely dynasty, descended from the Norse-Russian Rurik who had founded the Russian state in the ninth century. His grandmother Saint Olga had been the first Christian ruler of Rus: she had traveled to Constantinople about 957 and had been baptized by the Patriarch with the Byzantine emperor as her godfather. But Olga had not been able to convert her son Sviatoslav (Vladimir\'s father), who remained committed to pagan worship and to military expansion. Vladimir was Sviatoslav\'s youngest son, born about 958 to Malusha, the housekeeper of Olga\'s court. Vladimir grew up around his Christian grandmother but was raised in the pagan religious tradition of his father. After Sviatoslav\'s death in 972 in battle on the Danube, his three sons fought for the throne: Yaropolk in Kiev, Oleg in the Drevlianian territory, and Vladimir in Novgorod. Yaropolk killed Oleg in battle. Vladimir fled to Scandinavia. He returned a few years later with a Varangian army, took Polotsk (killing the prince and forcibly marrying his daughter Rogneda), then took Kiev and killed Yaropolk. By 980 he was Grand Prince of all Rus. He ruled as a pagan for the next eight years. He was, by all accounts, a typical pagan warrior-prince: extending his realm by conquest, maintaining many wives and concubines, erecting pagan idols (the famous statue of Perun in Kiev was the centerpiece of his pagan religious infrastructure), and even, on at least one notorious occasion, allowing human sacrifice when the lot fell on the young son of Saint Theodore the Varangian (both father and son were killed for the father\'s refusal to surrender his son). The pagan Vladimir was an unpromising figure for Christian conversion.
About 986 missionaries began arriving at Kiev from various religious traditions seeking Vladimir\'s conversion. Muslim Bulgars came from the Volga, urging the prince to embrace Islam. Khazar Jews came from the east. German Latin Christians came from the Holy Roman Empire. Byzantine Greek Orthodox Christians came from Constantinople. Vladimir was open to investigation. He met with each group, heard their teaching, asked questions. The Primary Chronicle preserves Vladimir\'s objections to each. To the Muslim Bulgars who told him their religion forbade pork and wine, he answered famously: drinking is the joy of the Russes, we cannot live without it. The dietary requirements of Islam excluded it from his consideration. To the Khazar Jews he asked: where is your homeland? They answered that they had been driven into exile because of their sins. Vladimir replied: how then can you teach others, if you yourselves are punished by God for unbelief? To the German Catholics he was less interested; the chronicle records simply that he was unimpressed by their account. The Greek Orthodox philosopher made the deepest impression. He presented the entire Christian story from creation through the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Last Judgment. He showed Vladimir an icon depicting the Last Judgment with the saved on the right and the damned on the left. Vladimir said: it is good for those on the right; woe to those on the left. The philosopher said: be baptized, and you will be on the right. Vladimir wanted to investigate further. In 987, on the advice of his boyars, he sent embassies to observe each religion in its own homeland. The embassy to Constantinople was conducted with full Byzantine ceremony. The Patriarch arranged for the Russian envoys to attend a Divine Liturgy at Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of Constantinople. The envoys returned with the famous report: when we entered the Greek church, we did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth. We have never seen such beauty. We can only say that there God dwells among men. Vladimir\'s boyars said: if the Greek faith had been bad, your grandmother Olga would not have embraced it. Vladimir made his decision. He chose Orthodoxy.
The actual circumstances of Vladimir\'s baptism in 988 were politically complex. The Byzantine empire was facing internal rebellion under the rebel general Bardas Phokas. Emperor Basil II needed military help. Vladimir offered to send a Russian Varangian force in exchange for the hand of the emperor\'s sister, Anna Porphyrogenita. To marry Anna would be an extraordinary honor. No Byzantine princess "born in the purple" -- that is, born to a reigning emperor -- had ever been given to a foreign ruler. The Holy Roman Emperor had been refused; the king of France had been refused. To get Anna, Vladimir agreed to be baptized. The Byzantines sent the troops, Basil II crushed the rebellion, but then he hesitated to send Anna. Vladimir, to force the issue, besieged and captured the Byzantine city of Chersonesus in the Crimea (988), then demanded that Anna be sent immediately. The emperors complied. Anna sailed to Chersonesus with a retinue of clergy. The hagiographical tradition records that just before Anna arrived Vladimir was struck with blindness. Anna told him to be baptized and his sight would return. He was baptized at Chersonesus by Metropolitan Michael, taking the Christian name Basil in honor of the Byzantine emperor. At the moment of baptism his sight was restored. He emerged from the water seeing both physically and spiritually, recapitulating the pattern of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. He married Anna immediately. He returned to Kiev in the spring of 988 with Anna, the priests, the relics, the sacred vessels, the liturgical books, and Metropolitan Michael, the first Metropolitan of Kiev. Russian Christian history began at that moment.
Vladimir returned to Kiev in 988 with everything required to establish the new Russian Christianity. He acted immediately. He went first to the principal pagan shrine: the great statue of Perun, his old patron, the chief god of the Russian pagan pantheon. He had the statue thrown down, dragged through the streets of Kiev tied to a horse\'s tail, beaten with rods, and finally cast into the Dnieper. The other pagan idols were similarly destroyed. The infrastructure of Russian paganism was systematically dismantled. Then came the baptism of the people. Vladimir issued a proclamation: anyone, rich or poor, who did not come to the river the next day to be baptized would be his enemy. The Christian missionaries and Vladimir himself preached through the city, explaining the new faith. On the appointed day the population of Kiev gathered at the confluence of the Pochaina with the Dnieper; some sources call it the Khreshchatyk, "the place of baptism." The priests stood in the water; the people entered in groups. The corporate baptism continued through the day. The hagiographical tradition records that the baptism was attended by extensive joy and that the people, instructed in advance, were in many cases enthusiastic. Vladimir himself stood on the bank praying, lifting up his hands to heaven, asking God to confirm the people of Russia in the faith they were now receiving. Across the subsequent years and decades the same pattern was repeated across the Russian principalities: the destruction of pagan shrines, the corporate baptism of the people, the establishment of churches, the deployment of Bulgarian-trained Slavonic-speaking clergy. Some regions accepted Christianity peacefully; others (especially Novgorod) had to be brought to baptism by force, with subsequent resistance from pagan populations. But within a few decades Russian Christianity had been established across the entire Vladimirian realm.
He sent away his concubines, fed the poor with carts of food, built churches and schools, tried to abolish the death penalty. Vladimir\'s Christian conversion produced substantial personal transformation. He sent away his many wives and concubines (Rogneda was sent to a convent and took the Christian name Anastasia), and lived in faithful monogamous marriage with Princess Anna for the next twenty-three years until her death in 1011. The pagan warrior-prince became famous for charity to the poor. He instituted a daily practice that became legendary in Kievan tradition: every day his servants loaded carts with bread, meat, fish, vegetables, honey, and kvass; the carts were driven through the streets of Kiev, with the prince\'s servants asking at each house if there were any sick or aged who could not come to the prince. Whatever they needed was given. Vladimir said to his bishops: I cannot bear to see any of my brethren in want. He attempted to abolish the death penalty entirely from Russian law on Christian principles; the bishops eventually persuaded him that some criminal punishments were necessary, but he had begun by trying to remove all violence from his administration. He built churches across his realm. The Tithe Church in Kiev, completed in 996, was dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God and supported by ten percent of the prince\'s income (hence the name). He established schools for the children of the boyars and the priests, requiring systematic Christian education across the Russian elite. He minted gold and silver coins bearing the image of Christ on one side and the prince on the other -- a clear statement that his rule was integrated with the rule of Christ. He continued military activity (especially against the Pechenegs, the dangerous nomadic confederation on his southern border), but his characteristic posture became one of defensive Christian rule rather than aggressive pagan conquest. The Russian people called him Krasno Solnyshko, "the Beautiful Sun," in affectionate memory of his bright Christian rule.
The patristic tradition recognizes a special category for saints whose missionary work brings entire nations or peoples to Christianity: Equal-to-the-Apostles (Greek isapostolos). The category began with Saints Constantine and Helena, the imperial founders of Christian Roman civilization. It extended to Saint Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the Resurrection. It extends to Saints Cyril and Methodius, the brothers who brought Christianity to the Slavs. It extends to Saint Nina of Georgia, who converted the Georgian people. It extends to Saint Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia, who brought the Armenian people to Christianity. It extends to Saint Olga, Vladimir\'s grandmother, the first Christian ruler of Rus. And it extends, supremely in the Russian tradition, to Saint Vladimir himself. The category is significant: it places certain missionary saints in a position parallel to the original apostles, recognizing that their work of bringing entire peoples to Christianity participates in the foundational apostolic mission. Saint Hilarion of Kiev, the first Russian Metropolitan of Kiev (eleventh century), composed the famous Sermon on Law and Grace as an oration on Saint Vladimir, explicitly comparing him to Saint Constantine and arguing that his evangelization of the Russian land was parallel to the evangelization of the Roman world by the original apostles. The category has continued in the Russian Orthodox tradition. Saint Vladimir is venerated as Equal-to-the-Apostles together with his grandmother Saint Olga. His feast day on July 15 has been observed in the Russian Orthodox tradition continuously since at least the thirteenth century. The category integrates the Russian conversion with the patristic tradition of missionary witness, manifesting the conviction that the Russian people received their Christianity through a foundational apostolic-equivalent saint whose work constitutes one of the complete patristic missionary achievements.
The Russian Church venerates him as Equal-to-the-Apostles. His Baptism of Rus founded a thousand years of Christian civilization. Vladimir reposed on July 15, 1015, at his country estate of Berestovo near Kiev, after a brief illness. He had ruled the Russian realm for thirty-seven years (978-1015), of which twenty-seven were after his Christian baptism. His final months had been complicated by family difficulties: his elder son Yaroslav (then ruling Novgorod) had refused to render the customary tribute and was preparing rebellion; Vladimir was preparing to march north against him when he fell ill. His relics were taken to the Tithe Church in Kiev and buried in a marble crypt beside the marble crypt of Empress Anna (who had died in 1011). After his death the succession crisis broke out: his elder son Sviatopolk seized the throne and had Boris, Gleb, and other brothers murdered (the foundation of the Boris-Gleb Passion-Bearer veneration). Yaroslav eventually defeated Sviatopolk in 1019 and consolidated the Russian throne, ruling as Yaroslav the Wise until 1054 and continuing his father\'s Christianization of the Russian realm. The veneration of Saint Vladimir began immediately upon his death, with substantial commemoration in Kiev and the broader Russian Christian world. The formal canonization came somewhat later: the Russian Church established his feast on July 15 by decree of Saint Alexander Nevsky after the Battle of the Neva on July 15, 1240, when Saint Vladimir\'s intercession was credited with the Russian victory over the Crusaders. By the thirteenth century the Equal-to-the-Apostles designation was firmly established. His veneration extends across the entire Eastern Orthodox tradition (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Georgian, and others), the Roman Catholic Church (which canonized him as a pre-schism Western saint), and the Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with Rome. He is the founder of all subsequent Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Christianity. The Russian Orthodox tradition continues to call him Krasno Solnyshko, the Beautiful Sun, in affectionate memory of his bright Christian rule. His name remains among the most popular Russian Christian names. The Saint Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev, the Saint Vladimir Monument in Kiev, the Saint Vladimir Cathedral at Chersonesus (commemorating the site of his baptism), and innumerable churches, monasteries, theological schools, and other Christian foundations across the Russian Orthodox world bear his name.