Not content to influence the church from the outside, women entered it as well. Hundreds, perhaps thousands became nuns in the first few centuries after conversion. The Rus believed it desirable for all their daughters to marry, and therefore they did not enroll young girls in convents, as did the western Christians. Instead, most Rus nuns took up the religious life as middle-aged widows. Because Rus monasticism followed the Eastern Orthodox model in being decentralized, and because the Rus elite did not practice feudalism, which granted fiefs to monastic communities, large and powerful convents led by abbesses did not develop in the Rus lands. Rather, Rus nuns lived in small compounds and were supervised by monks from nearby monasteries.
Women were also present in the Rus church as priest’s wives. Orthodox priests were required to marry, for church authorities believed that having wives would help priests control their sexual urges.8 By the end of the Rus era, there were priestly families living and working in some villages, where there was little to distinguish the wives officially from other women. They had no liturgical role. Perhaps they held a slightly higher status in the community of village women by virtue of being married to priests.
As Christianity spread, it absorbed some of the older religious ideas of the Rus in a blending process known as syncretism. This merger, often encouraged by Christian missionaries, took place all over Europe as people converted, and among the Rus, as elsewhere, it went on for centuries. In Kiev, Vladimir ordered statues of Perun, the sky god who spoke in thunder, thrown into the rivers; the Rus later attributed thunder to the Old Testament prophet Elijah. Across Europe, people did the same, transferring legends of dragon-killing warriors to a mythic saint named George, for example. The Rus kept on wearing amulets to repel evil spirits too, only now the amulets were crosses or the likenesses of saints.
An important part of this syncretism was the blending of Rus and Christian gender ideas. Identifying Christian influences on pre-existing Rus beliefs is difficult, because Christian monks wrote the historical documents. That said, there is some evidence that Christianity may have stressed women’s sinfulness more than did pre-Christian Rus patriarchy. Orthodox and Catholic churches taught that women were prone to the sin of Eve—that is, that they readily succumbed to temptations, particularly sexual ones, and then seduced men to sin also. Scholars now debate whether Catholicism obsessed more about Eve’s fall than did Orthodoxy. What is clear is that Rus monks, like their Western counterparts, excoriated women for leading men astray. In an essay on female vice and virtue written in the eleventh century, an anonymous monk declared, “Small is all wickedness compared to the wickedness of a woman; may a sinner’s lot befall her. A wicked woman is a wound to the heart. From woman is the beginning of sin, and because of her we all die.”9
Christianity paired these wailings about women’s wickedness with instructions to women on how to be good. The monk quoted above also wrote, “A virtuous and wise wife is a blessed lot and will be given as a portion to those who fear the Lord.” Women who chose sin, often defined as sexual licentiousness and/or rebellion against authority, were evil, dangerous, and far too numerous, he declared, but those who practiced virtue, particularly chastity and service to their husbands, were to be treasured. The best women of all—loving mothers—should be venerated and obeyed. Indeed, there was persistent emphasis throughout Rus writings on the obligation to revere mothers. “Give honor to your mother,” the monk advised, “and do her all good so that with joy you will see the Lord and rejoice in this forever.”10
Closely allied to this veneration was praise of the saints and the Virgin Mary. The Virgin, the most important of the female spirits, was the perfect mother, always merciful, forgiving, long-suffering, gentle, and protective. The Rus came to see her as a powerful figure, ever willing to intercede for her children with the deity. Over the centuries, Mary and the female saints became central to women’s faith in Russia, as they were across Europe. There were fewer female saints in the Rus pantheon than in Western Christendom, but those women that were recognized for their sanctity made women feel welcome in the faith and gave a focus to their worship. Their example also reminded the Rus and their descendants that women, despite their frailties, were just as capable as men of receiving the gifts of God’s grace and eternal life.
Christianity may also have appealed to women in Rus lands and across Europe because it enjoined men and women to cultivate virtues that were seen as more feminine than masculine. The church declared that both sexes should be pious, kind, selfless, dutiful, contemptuous of worldly riches and ambitions, and non-violent. This meekness did not appeal to the military men who were Europe’s political leaders. From Roman times onward, they denounced the faith as a religion for women and cowardly men. Sviatoslav was typical of the warriors in thinking that conversion would make him seem effeminate. In response, the church, ever adept at fashioning compromises to win converts, came up with a set of masculine values tailored for the warriors. The Christian soldier, priests declared, could and should be a ferocious fighter, hunter, and leader of men. But when he came home to his family, he should put away his weapons and his warrior swagger and become a dutiful husband and father, a defender of the poor and weak, a generous patron of the church, and, perhaps above all, the humble servant of all those men, clerical as well as lay, who had power over him. These were the values preached by the Orthodox missionaries who converted the Rus; Vladimir found them persuasive. There was always and everywhere a good deal of space between the ideal and the reality of warrior behavior, but the priests were at least preaching a kinder, gentler masculinity.
The Rus also adopted Byzantium’s legal system and thereby laid a foundation for Russian law that would endure until the 1917 Revolution. The law codes, drawn up by monks working for the princes, defined women’s property and inheritance rights as well as men’s, set the penalties for crimes against women, and regulated women’s access to the courts. The foundational principle of these codes was patriarchaclass="underline" senior men should rule their families justly and should care for and protect their dependents.
Rus authorities followed the European custom of dividing the laws into two general categories: secular, which included property and criminal law and fell under the jurisdiction of the princes; and ecclesiastical, which included regulation of the clergy, marriage (which was a religious sacrament), sexual behavior, and religious conformity, and was controlled by the church. Some Rus laws that addressed women were more liberal than the laws of other Europeans; some were stricter. Overall, the differences are less significant than the similarities. Unfortunately, the records of Rus courts have not survived, so we know very little about how laws were applied in specific cases. The courts probably concentrated on disputes among city dwellers and their reach into the countryside was probably confined to areas around the cities.
Women’s property and inheritance rights were defined in the secular codes. The lawmakers worked with two guiding principles: men were to own most property and women were to be provided for. The codes they drafted required that women receive dowries, which would remain their property after they married, rather than being folded into the marital family’s property, as was common in contemporary England and elsewhere. They also stipulated that sons were to inherit the lion’s share of their families’ holdings. Should a father not will anything to his daughter, her brothers were obliged to provide her a dowry. For their part, husbands were enjoined to leave their wives enough moveable property—precious objects, money, clothing, livestock, tools—and the income from sufficient land to support them for the rest of their lives. They could give them whatever else beyond the minimum that they chose. Widows possessed some discretionary power to determine which of the male heirs would inherit the family patrimony. These laws, which were very similar to those of other Scandinavian and Germanic peoples, were more restrictive than Byzantine rules, which granted sons and daughters equal inheritance rights, and which set definite percentages regarding the inheritances of widows. On the other hand, Rus law compared favorably with that of such Western European cities as Avignon, where daughters were banned from inheriting anything.11