Yet Byzantine culture was a strange phenomenon. It is hard for us to conceive of a great city and a great empire with powerful armies in which religion was the all-absorbing subject of interest. Constantinople was a fusion of the remains of Greek civilization, of many elements of the Roman Empire, and of ideas, habits and customs that had been brought in from Asia Minor, north Africa, Arabia, and points further east. Its religious art was based on principles which were far from realistic. Its ikons and its mosaics are still the wonder of the world, as the cleaning of the mosaics in Hagia Sophia is showing us. Its wealth, luxury, and formalism are proverbial, and yet the slightest acquaintance with its history shows us that there were very human aspects of life hidden under the stately pomp and the cold splendor of display. It is small wonder that the Rus and the pagan Slavs were attracted by this outstanding and beautiful culture. Constantinople had no objections and Saints Cyril and Methodius created the first Slavonic alphabet and carried the Liturgy in Slavonic to Moravia and Bulgaria and the other Slavonic lands. Finally it penetrated to Rus in the days of St. Volodimir and Christian Kiev was on its way. Soon all the books of the Church and the lives of the saints which had been translated into Church Slavonic were available in the capital and were gradually corrected into a language which was intelligible at Kiev. But such works as the _Russka Pravda_ (the Russian law code of the eleventh century), the writings of Daniel the Palmer and the _Instructions_ of Volodimir Monomakh speak of the high level which had already been achieved. There was little secular literature of which we know except the writings of the princes and their supporters. The only outstanding specimen of imaginative writing is the _Tale of the Armament of Ihor_ which has presented as many problems as it has solved.