In 987 Vladimir of Novogorod was baptized at Kieff[526] with his warrior band. He married a Greek princess named Anna, who was a powerful ally of the priests in maintaining her half-savage husband in the path which he had adopted. The influence of these churchmen was by no means an unmixed blessing for Russia; for they brought with them conceptions of government which were wholly alien to Slav traditions. In the great Eastern Empire, which had inherited no small share of the power and glory of Rome, the chief of the state was much more than a first magistrate. He was the head of the Church, Pontifex Maximus as well as Autocrat, and exacted implicit allegiance and submission. His sovereignty was transmissible to his heirs; and a wide gulf separated the imperial family from the noblest subject. The law in Byzantium was mainly that of Rome, which regarded offences as injuries to the state and as calling for sanguinary punishments rather than compensation to the private individual aggrieved. Women there occupied a position of inferiority. They were jealously guarded, and were forbidden to show their faces in public or in the church. The Russian priests sought in a monarch of the European type a secular arm for the defence of their privileges. Their teachings were eagerly assimilated by Vladimir, who, at his death in 1015, parcelled out his domains amongst twelve sons. The new theory of kingship received a wider extension at the hands of Yaroslav the Wise, a politic sovereign whose chief care it was to elevate the status of his caste. Henceforward Kieff was regarded as the mother city, and the seat of the eldest of his kin. The other centres--Novogorod, Pskov, Smolensk, and Polotsk--were free to select their own princes, with the proviso that the chosen one must be descended from Yaroslav. But the narrow tyranny of the Church and the growth of a royal caste were not the only cankers eating into the heart of the Russian commonwealths. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the rise of the Bolars, or Boyars, a class of great proprietors descended from successful warriors, or citizens enriched by commerce, who engrossed huge tracts of soil and reduced the free cultivators to a status of bondage. Their power as councillors of the prince soon ousted that of the popular assemblies, and its expansion was furthered by the importation from Germany of the worst features of feudalism, unillumined by the tender light of chivalry. The revolution received a vast impetus by the transfer of the seat of power from Kieff to Suzdal and Rostov, peopled by the colonisation of the territories watered by the Oka and Upper Volga. The inhabitants of the Great Russia which thus took its origin were without traditions of independence, and offered their necks willingly to the feudal yoke. In the twelfth century the prince of Suzdal built the town of Vladimir and subdued Kieff, making his own metropolis the centre of Russian politics. Then, pushing their