ABSTRACT
Engaged in land colonisation and struggle with nomads on the threshold of Asia, the tide of events in the West passed her by unheeded. The Western Slavs found in Bohemia and Eastern Germany, where they settled, some remnant of an old religion or culture. Roman Christianity had already reached these parts and settled conditions prevailed in the main. Thus the Eastern Slavs by the direction of their expansion became politically hampered in their development and spiritually cut off from their kinsmen who had migrated westwards into Europe. Contact with nomadic Asia made the Russians in the early part of their history cruder and less developed than the peoples further west in Europe. The Slavs and Varangers at the time were pagan, but during the tenth century they at last came up against influences of a higher and older civilisation than theirs; none other than that of the Byzantine Empire with its Greek Orthodox Christianity.
