Summing up, the Early Byzantine period witnessed the birth of a very special kind of mission: very rarely it was the initiative of individuals or groups of monks or even local churches — usually it was a political undertaking carried out by government envoys of religious character. In most cases, such missions were invited by «barbaric» rulers, who visited Constantinople personally and got baptism at the hands of the Emperor. Leaders of primordial «barbaric states» regarded Christianity as a pass to the community of «normal» states, whereas developed political entities tried to reject the excessive Byzantine claims of global tutelage. If we outline all the missionary endeavors of Constantinople implemented outside the imperial borders without any provoking instigation from outside, we will see that they extended to the Crimea, Abkhazia, and Sudan, that is, territories which could be regarded as potential fields of political conquest.
III
Middle Byzantine period began with catastrophic defeats of the Empire both in Asia (from Arabs) and in Europe (from Bulgars). Greek Christianity outside Byzantium declined as well. But even before the Empire began to recover, Byzantines resumed missionary efforts. There was even more space for individual initiative than before. The first preacher of the new epoch was Stephen (8>thC.), bishop of Sugdaia in the Crimea, which belonged to Khazars. Stephen was ardently christianizing Khazars on his own account, without any support from Constantinople, governed by an iconoclastic emperor hostile to Stephen. However, the real revitalization of mission came with the general renaissance of the Empire in the 9>thcentury. This renewed interest in mission can be traced in the renewal of the cult of St. Andrew, proverbial preacher to «barbarians». His new Vita, which was written in the 1 half of the 9>lhcentury, depicts an ideal missionary. The pivot of this trend is the appearance of Cyril and Methodius, «apostles» of Slavs. Hundreds of books were written about them and the author has no intention to go into any details. What is important is that Thessaloniki brothers mattered more to their converts than to the Empire. Constantinople did not care about the fates of the brothers, did not help them — here lies the reason why Byzantine sources never mentioned Cyril and Methodius.
The conversion of Bulgaria in the 860s already bears all the birthmarks of the «political mission run by the state», known to us from Early Byzantium. Greeks’ conduct was so unscrupulous, the spiritual instruction was so ruthlessly superseded with the imposition of Greek customs and habits, the religious aspect was so strongly overshadowed by the political one, that Bulgars abhorred it and for a short while defected to the side of Rome. Thanks to this, we have a precious source — questions put by Bulgars to the Pope concerning the missionary practice of the Byzantines. From this document we learn how inflexible and arrogant Greek missionaries were. And we know that it nearly cost them a defeat. The responses of the Pope Nicholas I to these questions show drastic differences between Western and Eastern approaches to mission. By the way, the same intransigence was shown by Methodius and his disciples in Moravia. The final defeat of Cyrillo‑Methodian mission there (not backed by Byzantine government anyway) was caused by the narrow‑minded position of the Orthodox clergy, who did not condescend to the immaturity of Moravian Christianity and demanded from Slavic neophytes to observe the most severe Byzantine rites. On the other hand, competing Latin clergy showed a great deal of tolerance and won the upper hand. The same period saw the first attempt to baptize Rus’ — most probably, abortive. Patriarch Photius, a great literatus and churchman of the 9