their honor. He ordered splendid memorials to various
deities to be erected throughout the country, and he specially honored
Perune, the father of the gods, for whom he provided a new pair of
golden whiskers--golden whiskers being the special glory of Perune.

Not content with this, Vladimir ordered a human sacrifice to be made,
and selected for the victim a Christian youth of the capital. The father
of the boy resisted, and both were slain, locked in each other's arms.

Vladimir gave vast sums of money to the religious establishments, and
behaved generally like a very devout pagan. His piety and generosity
made him so desirable a patron that efforts were made by the priests of
other religions to convert him. Jews, Mohammedans, Catholics, and Greeks
all sought to win him, and Vladimir began seriously to consider the
question of changing his religion. He appointed a commission, consisting
of ten boyards, and ordered them to examine into the comparative merits
of the different religions, and to report to him. When their report was
made, Vladimir weighed the matter carefully.

He began by rejecting Mohammedanism, because it forbids the use of wine,
and Vladimir was not at all disposed to become a water-drinker. Judaism,
he said, was a homeless religion, its followers being wanderers on the
face of the earth, under a curse; so he would have nothing to do with
that faith. The Catholic religion would not do at all, because it
recognized in the pope a superior to himself, and Vladimir had no mind
to acknowledge a superior. The Greek religion was free from these
objections, and moreover, by adopting it he would bring himself into
friendship with the great Greek or Byzantine Empire, whose capital was
at Constantinople, and that was something which he earnestly desired to
accomplish.

Accordingly, he determined to become a Christian and a member of the
Greek Church; but how? There were serious difficulties in the way. In
order to become a Christian he must be baptized, and he was puzzled
about how to accomplish that. There were many Greek priests in his
capital, any one of whom would have been glad to baptize the heathen
monarch, but Vladimir would not let a mere priest convert him into a
Christian. Nobody less than an archbishop would do for that, and there
was no archbishop in Russia.

It is true that there were plenty of archbishops in the dominions of his
Byzantine neighbors, and that the Greek emperors, Basil and Consta