A prince shopped for a faith, then married an emperor's sister
According to the medieval chronicle, Grand Prince Vladimir sent envoys to compare religions before choosing Byzantine Christianity. He then seized Chersonesus in Crimea and demanded the sister of Emperor Basil II as his bride, being baptised as a condition of the match in 988. That year became the official birth date of Russian Orthodoxy.
The Russian Orthodox Church, officially the Moscow Patriarchate, is a self-governing Eastern Orthodox body led by the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus', with 194 dioceses inside Russia. Its origin story reaches back further than Vladimir. The 12th-century Primary Chronicle claims the Apostle Andrew travelled around the Black Sea, stood where Kiev would rise and predicted a great Christian city there. No historical evidence supports the tale, yet Russian church historians have often woven it into their accounts.
Christianity arrived gradually. Christians appear among the Varangians under Prince Igor, and his widow Olga was baptised sometime between 946 and 960, most likely in Constantinople. Her son Sviatoslav refused to follow her. After Vladimir's conversion, Christianity became the state religion by the early 11th century, and by the early 13th some 40 bishoprics existed, all ultimately answering to Constantinople. In 1988 the church formally fixed 988 as the date of the country's Christianization.
Mongol invasions shattered Kiev's importance, and the church's centre moved north. Metropolitan Maximus relocated to Vladimir in 1299, and his successor Peter settled in Moscow in 1325, backing its prince against rival Tver. Peter was buried in Moscow's new Dormition Cathedral, effectively naming the city as the church's future capital. Theognostus finished that cathedral, added four more stone churches, and had Peter canonised in 1339, lifting Moscow's prestige.
Independence followed in stages. The Russian church elected its own metropolitan in 1448, declaring autocephaly, and in 1589 Constantinople agreed to raise the post to patriarch. Mid-17th-century reforms split the faithful, as the Old Believers rejected the changes. In the 1920s, emigre communities formed the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, headquartered in the United States; the two bodies reconciled on 17 May 2007.
Source: Russian Orthodox Church
