ABSTRACT
The Russian Church was a true daughter of the Byzantine Church. When Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted to Christianity, traditionally dated to 988, he gave his religious adherence to Constantinople, not Rome, and Greek missionaries were sent north to organize the church and to evangelize the people. By the mid-eleventh century the primate of that church was the metropolitan of Kiev, an appointee of the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Greek influence was so pronounced that, by the time of the invasion of the Mongols of 1238-40 that ended the Kievan period of Russian history, seventeen of the twenty-three metropolitans of Kiev had been Greek.
