Chapter 4 - Spiritual Life

Summary

Religious Beliefs

The last quarter of the first millennium and the beginning of the second millennium are characterized by a confrontation between pagan beliefs and Christianity. Converting European peoples to Christianity proved to be a quite lengthy and complex process. The Christianization of the pagan European peoples was largely achieved “from above,” which is to say by the conversion of leaders, which led to the conversion of their subjects; this was the case, for example, for the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the Russians, the Hungarians, and many others.

The emergence and spread of Christianity in the Carpathian-Danubian regions was not the result of some officially imposed action or through organized missionary activities, which led to the uneven and delayed conversion of the population in these regions. The advancement of Christianity north of the Lower Danube in the early medieval period must be understood in terms of the process of converting to the new religion of the neighbouring peoples. The Bulgarian Khan Boris was baptized in the summer of 865 by a bishop at the head of a group of clerics sent from Constantinople for this occasion, and Emperor Michael III was the godfather of the baptism, which was why the Khan, in all probability, took Michael as his Christian name. After the Christianization of the Bulgarians, there was a thaw in Bulgarian-Byzantine relations. Thus the official Christianization of the Bulgarians, carried out with the direct contribution of Byzantium, had a direct impact on the process of the advancement of Christianity in the territories north of the Lower Danube after the second half of the ninth century. P. Iambor noticed, correctly, that in the Romanian historiography, probably for fear of political interference, “they pass too easily over explaining the origin of some medieval institutions, especially the adoption of the Slavonic language in the church, culture, and the medieval Romanian chancery.” The absence of sufficiently developed political entities in the Carpathian-Danubian regions during the eighth– ninth centuries excluded this area from the direct attention of Byzantium and only to the extent that some areas were under Bulgarian influence or domination did they enter the sphere of Christian influence. The situation changed only after the fall of the Bulgarian Khanate when Byzantium restored its dominance in the Danubian regions.