>thcentury, who is believed to be the mastermind of Byzantine missionary efforts of this period, shows great contempt for «barbarians». From his point of view, the only way for them to become Christians was to bow to the Christian Empire.
It was a deadlock for mission: in order to convince people in whatever, you have to please them. Byzantines learned their lesson: it becomes obvious from our scrutiny of another crucial source, insufficiently used by scholars in this respect — letters of Constantinopolitan Patriarch Nicholas Mysticos (1 half of the 10>thC.). He instructs his missionaries to make tactical concessions to «barbaric» rulers — quite opposite to what Patriarch Photios insisted on in the previous century. The first success of the 10>thcentury was the conversion of Alania in the Northern Caucasus. Although it turned out to be not decisive and Alanian Christianity was uprooted soon for several decades, although a great role in this conversion was played by Abkhazian Orthodox church (a replay of the situation of Arabia — Ethiopia in the 6>thC.), still it is hard to overestimate the fact that Constantinopolitan Patriarchate finally won over this, absolutely «barbaric» area for itself for the next five hundred years.
In the middle of the 10>thcentury one more area was converted to Byzantine Christianity — Hungary. At the first stage, Magyar princes visited Constantinople for baptism and imperial gifts (we know this routine from the Early Byzantine period); at the second stage Greek clergy went there for everyday work. In the Hungarian case we have many archeological evidence which facilitate our understanding of the details of this work. Another source of our information is Christian vocabulary of Hungarian language. The majority of this vocabulary is of Slavic origin, which means that Greeks did not interfere much with the local population, relying more on the help of local Christian Slavs. Finally, Hungary defected from the Constantinopolitan realm to the Roman one.
The main success of Byzantine missionary activities and Byzantine foreign policy in general was the conversion of Rus’. It turns out that the Greeks did not pay a slightest attention to this event which enlarged the domain of Orthodoxy twofold! In analyzing missionary practices of Greeks in Rus’ the author draws on some sources, rarely used by Byzatine scholars — the Old Russian Vita of Leontius, bishop of Rostov, the answers of John, the Greek metropolitan of Rus’ in the 11>thcentury, to the questions of the inferior missionaries. John tries to be tolerant — but he cannot. He insists on stringent observation of all Byzantine rites («as in the State of Romans, i. e. Byzantines»). The only concession he makes concerns severe Russian frosts: he lets priests put fur clothes under their liturgical garments.