Shortly after this exploit Olga left Kiev and went into the northern parts of her son’s realm, fixing her court for some years at Novgorod and Pskov, and raising the prosperity of those townships by keeping up a connection with the Skandinavian lands. Later she turned her thoughts towards the south, not with warlike projects, as her forerunners had done, but with peaceful intent. Accompanied by a suitable train she journeyed, in the year 957, to Constantinople, where she was received and entertained with due splendour by the Emperor Constantine-born-in-the-Purple and the Patriarch Theophylact. Here, in the metropolis of the Christian religion, surrounded by all the splendours of ritual of which the Greeks were masters, this surprising woman adopted the prevalent faith, received at the hands of her Imperial host and sponsor the baptismal name of Helen, and became “the first Russian who mounted to the heavenly kingdom”--a rather disparaging reflection on the labours of the early Church at Kiev. Loaded with presents from the Imperial treasury, Olga returned to her son, whom she strove fruitlessly to detach from the gods of his fathers to the worship of the new deities she had brought from Constantinople. The Russian mind was not yet ripe for the mystic cult of the Greek or Latin Church, and the conversion of the Prince’s mother made little impression on either boyarins or people. In the year 964 Sviatoslav definitely assumed the government of the country, and struck the key-note of his reign by extending his sway over the Viatitches, the last Slavonic tribe who paid tribute to the Khazars. This was only preliminary to an attack on that people in their own country. The fate of their once powerful empire was decided in one battle; the arms of the young Kniaz were victorious; Sarkel, the White City, fell into his hands, the outlying possessions of the Khazars, east and south, were subdued, and the kakhanate was reduced to a shadow of its former glory. It would have been a wiser policy to have left untouched, for the time being, the integrity of a State which was no longer formidable, and which interposed a civilised barrier between the Russian lands and the barbarian hordes of the East, and to have pursued instead a war of extermination against the Petchenigs. Sviatoslav was himself to experience the disastrous results of this mistake. [Sidenote: 968]