and religion, to acknowledge Jesus for
their God, the Christian missionaries for their teachers, and the Romans
for their friends and brethren. His triumph was transient and premature.
In the various fortune of their piratical adventures, some Russian
chiefs might allow themselves to be sprinkled with the waters of
baptism; and a Greek bishop, with the name of metropolitan, might
administer the sacraments in the church of Kiow, to a congregation of
slaves and natives. But the seed of the gospel was sown on a barren
soil: many were the apostates, the converts were few; and the baptism
of Olga may be fixed as the aera of Russian Christianity. [74] A female,
perhaps of the basest origin, who could revenge the death, and assume
the sceptre, of her husband Igor, must have been endowed with those
active virtues which command the fear and obedience of Barbarians. In
a moment of foreign and domestic peace, she sailed from Kiow to
Constantinople; and the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus has
described, with minute diligence, the ceremonial of her reception in his
capital and palace. The steps, the titles, the salutations, the banquet,
the presents, were exquisitely adjusted to gratify the vanity of the
stranger, with due reverence to the superior majesty of the purple.
[75] In the sacrament of baptism, she received the venerable name of the
empress Helena; and her conversion might be preceded or followed by her
uncle, two interpreters, sixteen damsels of a higher, and eighteen of
a lower rank, twenty-two domestics or ministers, and forty-four Russian
merchants, who composed the retinue of the great princess Olga. After
her return to Kiow and Novogorod, she firmly persisted in her new
religion; but her labors in the propagation of the gospel were not
crowned with success; and both her family and nation adhered with
obstinacy or indifference to the gods of their fathers. Her son
Swatoslaus was apprehensive of the scorn and ridicule of his companions;
and her grandson Wolodomir devoted his youthful zeal to multiply and
decorate the monuments of ancient worship. The savage deities of the
North were still propitiated with human sacrifices: in the choice of
the victim, a citizen was preferred to a stranger, a Christian to an
idolater; and the father, who defended his son from the sacerdotal
knife, was involved in the same doom by the rage of a fanatic tumult.
Yet the lessons and example of the pious Olga had made a deep, though
secr