At almost the same time Christianity made its appearance. It was only natural that the most aggressive missionaries came from Constantinople, for the commercial ambitions of Kiev led it to the Black Sea in which the Byzantine Empire was supreme. Queen Olha, the mother of Svyatoslav, had become an Orthodox Christian in the middle of the tenth century but paganism was still too strong for her to convert the druzhina, the leading warriors and counsellors of the king, and a half century was to pass before the country was definitely converted under Volodymyr, or Vladimir. In the beginning Volodymyr, as a younger son of Svyatoslav by one of his numerous concubines, had become the ruler of Novgorod. He was thus able to secure new levies of Scandinavian troops from the North and to win the throne of Kiev. In his early life he led a pagan revival but he was apparently much interested in matters of religion and was dissatisfied with the pagan cult. According to the legend of the chroniclers, he sent embassies to investigate the Jewish religion of the Khozars, Mohammedanism, and the Christianity of the Germans and of the Greeks of Constantinople. The envoys were most impressed by the splendor of the services in the great Church of St. Sophia and on their return Volodymyr decided to seek baptism from the Patriarch of Constantinople. It required some time to bring this about, but in 989 all difficulties were finally removed and the Grand Prince and his druzhina were definitely baptized. Volodymyr at once cast the idols of Perun and the other pagan gods into the Dnyeper and from that time on, he became a zealous Christian. Without delay he built the first of the great Churches of Kiev, the Church of the Tithe (Desyatinnaya) and for this he employed the services of Greek architects. Kiev became speedily a small scale replica of Constantinople. The Greek monks introduced into the country Byzantine culture, architecture, and methods of thinking. The Metropolitan of Kiev was a Greek. Yet there was no attempt to force the Greek language upon the people. The Church services were held not in Greek but in the Church Slavonic language, which had been developed by Saints Cyril and Methodius a century earlier. His piety and zeal for the spreading of Christianity won Volodymyr the title of saint and hence it came about that his name appears in the religious services and in the Chronicles as Vladimir, the Church Slavonic form of Volodymyr. From the moment of Volodymyr’s conversion to Christianity and the appearance of the Church Slavonic language, the deep darkness that covers the history of Kiev and Rus’ begins to disappear. The monks engaged in the task of preparing the conventional Chronicles have given us confused views of the earlier history in which truth and romance are strangely mixed, but from this moment we can begin more clearly to trace the history of the country.