That these were no empty words and that the toleration here promised became a reality, may be judged from a letter sent to the K͟hān by Pope John XXII in 1318, in which he thanks the Muslim prince for the favour he showed to his Christian subjects and the kind treatment they received at his hands.[60] The successors of Ūzbek K͟hān do not appear to have been animated by the same zeal for the spread of Islam as he had shown, and could not be expected to succeed where he failed. So long as the Russians paid their taxes, they were left free to worship according to their own desires, and the Christian religion had become too closely intertwined with the life of the people to be disturbed, even had efforts been made to turn them from the faith of their fathers; for Christianity had been the national religion of the Russian people for well-nigh three centuries before the Mongols established themselves in Russian territory.
Another race many years before had tried to win the Russians to Islam but had likewise failed, viz. the Muslim Bulgarians who were found in the tenth century on the banks of the Volga, and who probably owed their conversion to the Muslim merchants, trading in furs and other commodities of the North; their conversion must have taken place some time before A.D. 921, when the caliph al-Muqtadir sent an envoy to confirm them in the faith and instruct them in the tenets and ordinances of Islam.[61]
These Bulgarians attempted the conversion of Vladimir, the then sovereign of Russia, who (the Russian chronicler tells us) had found it necessary to choose some religion better than his pagan creed, but they failed to overcome his objections to the rite of circumcision and to the prohibition of [[243]]wine, the use of which, he declared, the Russians could never give up, as it was the very joy of their life. Equally unsuccessful were the Jews who came from the country of the K͟hazars on the Caspian Sea and had won over the king of that people to the Mosaic faith.[62] After listening to their arguments, Vladimir asked them where their country was. “Jerusalem,” they replied, “but God in His anger has scattered us over the whole world.” “Then you are cursed of God,” cried the king, “and yet want to teach others: begone! we have no wish, like you, to be without a country.” The most favourable impression was made by a Greek priest who, after a brief criticism of the other religions, set forth the whole scheme of Christian teaching beginning with the creation of the world and the story of the fall of man and ending with the seven œcumenical councils accepted by the Greek Church; then he showed the prince a picture of the Last Judgment with the righteous entering paradise and the wicked being thrust down into hell, and promised him the heritage of heaven, if he would be baptised. But Vladimir was unwilling to make a rash choice of a substitute for his pagan religion, so he called his boyards together and having told them of the accounts he had received of the various religions, asked them for their advice. “Prince,” they replied, “every man praises his own religion, and if you would make choice of the best, send wise men into the different countries to discover which of all the nations honours God in the manner most worthy of Him.” So the prince chose out for this purpose ten men who were eminent for their wisdom. These ambassadors found among the Bulgarians mean-looking places of worship, gloomy prayers and solemn faces; among the German Catholics religious ceremonies that lacked both grandeur and magnificence. At length they reached Constantinople: “Let them see the glory of our God,” said the Emperor. So they were taken to the church of Santa Sophia, where the Patriarch, clad in his pontifical robes, was celebrating mass. The magnificence of the building, the rich vestments of the priests, the ornaments of the altars, the sweet odour of [[244]]the incense, the reverent silence of the people, and the mysterious solemnity of the ceremonial filled the savage Russians with wonder and amazement. It seemed to them that this church must be the dwelling of the Most High, and that He manifested His glory therein to mortals. On their return to Kief, the ambassadors gave the prince an account of their mission; they spoke with contempt of the religion of the Prophet and had little to say for the Roman Catholic faith, but were enthusiastic in their eulogies of the Greek Church. “Every man,” they said, “who has put his lips to a sweet draught, henceforth abhors anything bitter; wherefore we having come to the knowledge of the faith of the Greek Church desire none other.” Vladimir once more consulted his boyards, who said unto him, “Had not the Greek faith been best of all, Olga, your grandmother, the wisest of mortals, would never have embraced it.” Whereupon Vladimir hesitated no longer and in A.D. 988 declared himself a Christian. On the day after his baptism he threw down the idols his forefathers had worshipped, and issued an edict that all the Russians, masters and slaves, rich and poor, should submit to be baptised into the Christian faith.[63]
Thus Christianity became the national religion of the Russian people, and after the Mongol conquest, the distinctive national characteristics of Russians and Tatars that have kept the two races apart to the present day, the bitter hatred of the Tatar yoke, the devotion of the Russians to their own faith and the want of religious zeal on the part of the Tatars, kept the conquered race from adopting the religion of the conqueror. Especially has the prohibition of spirituous liquors by the laws of Islam been supposed to have stood in the way of the adoption of this religion by the Russian people.
It would appear that not until after the promulgation of the edict of religious toleration in 1905 throughout the Russian empire and the active Muslim propaganda that followed it, were cases observed of Russians being converted to Islam, and those that have occurred are ascribed to the strong attraction of the material help offered by the Tatars [[245]]to such converts and the influence of the moral strength of the Muslims themselves.[64]
Not that the Tatars in Russia had been altogether inoperative in promoting the spread of Islam during the preceding centuries. The distinctly Hellenic type of face that is to be found among the so-called Tatars of the Crimea has led to the conjecture that these Muhammadans have absorbed into their community the Greek and Italian populations that they found settled on the Crimean peninsula, and that we find among them the Muhammadanised descendants of the indigenous inhabitants, and of the Genoese colonists.[65] A traveller of the seventeenth century tells us that the Tatars of the Crimea tried to induce their slaves to become Muhammadans, and won over many of them to this faith by promising them their liberty if they would be persuaded.[66] Conversions to Islam from among the Tatars of the Crimea are also reported after the proclamation of religious liberty in 1905.[67]
A brief reference may here be made to the Tatars in Lithuania, where small groups of them have been settled since the early part of the fifteenth century; these Muslim immigrants, dwelling in the midst of a Christian population, have preserved their old faith, but (probably for political reasons) do not appear to have attempted to proselytise. But they have been in the habit of marrying Lithuanian and Polish women, whose children were always brought up as Muslims, whereas no Muhammadan girl was permitted to marry a Christian. The grand dukes of Lithuania in the fifteenth century encouraged the marriage of Christian women with their Tatar troops, on whom they bestowed grants of land and other privileges.[68]
One of the most curious incidents in the missionary history of Islam is the conversion of the Kirghiz of Central Asia by Tatar mullās, who preached Islam among them in the eighteenth century, as emissaries of the Russian government. The Kirghiz began to come under Russian rule [[246]]about 1731, and for 120 years all diplomatic correspondence was carried on with them in the Tatar language under the delusion that they were ethnographically the same as the Tatars of the Volga. Another misunderstanding on the part of the Russian government was that the Kirghiz were Musalmans, whereas in the eighteenth century they were nearly all Shamanists, as a large number of them were still up to the middle of the nineteenth century. At the time of the annexation of their country to the Russian empire only a few of their K͟hāns and Sulṭāns had any knowledge of the faith of Islam—and that very confused and vague. Not a single mosque was to be found throughout the whole of the Kirghiz Steppes, or a single religious teacher of the faith of the Prophet, and the Kirghiz owed their conversion to Islam to the fact that the Russians, taking them for Muhammadans, insisted on treating them as such. Large sums of money were given for the building of mosques, and mullās were sent to open schools and instruct the young in the tenets of the Muslim faith: the Kirghiz scholars were to receive every day a small sum to support themselves on, and the fathers were to be induced to send their children to the schools by presents and other means of persuasion. An incontrovertible proof that the Musalman propaganda made its way into the Kirghiz Steppes from the side of Russia, is the circumstance that it was especially those Kirghiz who were more contiguous to Europe that first became Musalmans, and the old Shamanism lingered up to the nineteenth century among those who wandered in the neighbourhood of Khiva, Buk͟hārā and Khokand, though these for centuries had been Muhammadan countries.[69]
This is probably the only instance of a Christian government co-operating in the promulgation of Islam, and is the more remarkable inasmuch as the Russian government of this period was attempting to force Christianity on its Muslim subjects in Europe, in continuation of the efforts [[247]]made in the sixteenth century soon after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century many of the Kirghiz dwelling in the vast plains stretching southwards from the district of Tobolsk towards Turkistan were still heathen, and the Russian government was approached for permission for a Christian mission to be established among them. But this request was not granted, on the ground that “these people were as yet too wild and savage to be accessible to the Gospel. But soon after other missionaries, not depending on the good-will of any government, and having more zeal and understanding, occupied this field and won the whole of the Kirghis tribe to the faith of Islam.”[70]