Sembiyan Mahadevi is a title borne by…

Emperor Nikephoros sends to Sviatoslav his agent, Kalokyros, in 967 or 968 with the task of talking Sviatoslav into assisting Constantinople in a war against Bulgaria.

Sviatoslav is paid fifteen thousand pounds of gold and sets sail with an army of fifty thousand men, including thousands of Pecheneg mercenaries.

According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, while Sviatoslav was pursuing this campaign against the First Bulgarian Empire, the Pechenegs (in all probability, bribed by Nikephoros) invade Rus and besiege his capital of Kiev.

While the besieged suffer from hunger and thirst, Sviatoslav's general Pretich deploys his druzhina, his personal guard, on the opposite (left) bank of the Dnieper, not daring to cross the river against the larger Pecheneg force.

Sviatoslav's mother Olga of Kiev (who is in Kiev together with all of Sviatoslav's sons), reduced to extremes, contemplates surrender, if Pretich does not relieve the siege within one day.

She is anxious to send word about her plans to Pretich.

At last, a boy fluent in the Pecheneg language volunteers to venture from the city and urge Pretich to action.

Pretending to be a Pecheneg, he goes about their camp, as if searching for a lost horse.

When he attempts to swim across the Dnieper, the Pechenegs discover his subterfuge and start shooting at him, but to no avail.

When the boy reaches the opposite bank and informs Pretich about the desperate condition of the Kievans, the general decides to make a sally in order to evacuate Sviatoslav's family from the city, for fear of his sovereign's anger.

Early in the morning, Pretich and his troops embark on boats across the Dnieper, making great noise with their trumpets.

The besieged start cheering, and Olga ventures out of the city towards the river.

The Pechenegs, thinking that Sviatoslav is returning with his great army, lifts the siege.

The Pecheneg leader then decides to confer with Pretich and asks him whether he is Sviatoslav.

Pretich admits that he is only a general but warns the Pecheneg ruler that his unit is a vanguard of Sviatoslav's approaching army.

As a sign of his peaceful disposition, the Pecheneg ruler shakes hands with Pretich and exchanges his own horse, sword and arrows for Pretich's armor.

As soon as the Pechenegs retreat, Olga sends a letter to Sviatoslav reproaching him for his neglect of the family and people.

Upon receiving the message, Sviatoslav speedily returns to Kiev and thoroughly defeats the Pechenegs, who are still threatening the city from the south.

Sviatoslav subsequently (probably in 968 or 969) destroys the Khazar capital of Atil.

A visitor to Atil wrote soon after Sviatoslav's campaign: "The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch." (The exact chronology of his Khazar campaign is uncertain and disputed; for example, Mikhail Artamonov and David Christian proposed that the sack of Sarkel came after the destruction of Atil.)

Construction of a church had begun in Poznan (Posen), the residence of the Polish royal dynasty, in 966; it is raised to the status of a cathedral in 968 when the first missionary, Bishop Jordan, comes to Poland.

Saint Peter becomes the patron of the church because, as the first cathedral in the country, it has the right to have the same patron as St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

(The pre-Romanesque church built at this time is about forty-eight meters in length; remains of this building are still visible in the basements of today's basilica.

The first church will survive for about seventy years, until the period of the pagan reaction and the raid of the Bohemian duke Bretislav in the 1030s.

The cathedral will be rebuilt in the Romanesque style, remains of which are visible in the southern tower.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the church would be rebuilt in the Gothic style, at which time, a crown of chapels will be added.

A fire in 1622 will do such serious damage that the cathedral needs a complete renovation, which will be carried out in the Baroque style.

After another major fire in 1772, the church will be rebuilt in the Neo-Classical style.

In 1821, Pope Pius VII will raise the cathedral to the status of a Metropolitan Archcathedral and add the second patron: Saint Paul.

The last of the great fires will occur on February 15, 1945, during the liberation of the city from the Germans.

The damage is serious enough that the conservators will decide to return to the Gothic style, using as a base medieval relics revealed by the fire.

The cathedral will be reopened on June 29, 1956.

Pope John XXIII will give the church the title of minor basilica in 1962.)

Otto I, immediately after defeating the Magyars at Lechfeld in 955, had set to work to establish an archbishopric in Magdeburg, for the stabilization, through Christianization, of the eastern territories.

He had wished to transfer the capital of the diocese from Halberstadt to Magdeburg, and make it an archdiocese, but had met strenuous opposition from the Archbishop of Mainz, who is the metropolitan of Halberstadt.

When, in 962, Pope John XII sanctioned the establishment of an archbishopric, Otto seemed to have abandoned his plan of a transfer.

The estates belonging to the convents mentioned above, founded in 937, have been converted into a mensa for the new archbishopric, and the monks had been transferred to the Berge Convent.

The archiepiscopal church makes St. Maurice its patron, and in addition receives new donations and grants from Otto.

Its ecclesiastical province include the existing dioceses of Brandenburg and Havelberg and the newly founded dioceses of Merseburg, Zeitz, and Meißen.

The new archdiocese is close to the unsecured border regions of the Holy Roman Empire and Slavic tribes, and is meant to promote Christianity among the many Slavs and others.

Then, on 20 April 967, the archbishopric had been solemnly established at the Synod of Ravenna in the presence of the pope and the emperor.

The first archbishop is Adelbert, a former monk of St. Maximin's at Trier, afterwards missionary bishop to the Russians, and Abbot of Weissenburg in Alsace.

He is elected in the autumn of 968, received the pallium at Rome, and at the end of the year is solemnly enthroned in Magdeburg.

The archdiocesan area of Magdeburg is rather small; it comprises the Slavonic districts of Serimunt, Nudizi, Neletici, Nizizi, and half of northern Thuringia, which Halberstadt has resigned.

The cathedral school will especially gain in importance under Adalbert's efficient administration.

The scholastic Othrich, Adlbert’s eventual successor, will be considered the most learned man of his times.

Many eminent men will be educated at Magdeburg.

Otto, the son of Saxon Duke Henry the Fowler and Matilda of Ringelheim, had succeeded his father as king of the Germans in 936.

The ancient case for bringing together the Eastern and Western parts of the former Roman empire had been dramatically altered when Otto had been crowned emperor of the Romans in 962, for this was a direct affront to the unique position of the emperor at Constantinople.

Otto has tried, and failed, to establish his claim, either by force in Constantinople’s province in Italy or by direct negotiation in the imperial capital.

His ambassador Liutprand of Cremona writes an account of his mission to Nikephoros Phokas in 968 and of the Emperor's scornful rejection of a proposed marriage between Otto's son and an imperial princess.

The unwise reference by the pope to the ruler in Constantinople as "Greek" in a letter while Liutprand had been in Constantinople had destroyed the first round of negotiations.

The incident vividly demonstrates, if not the superior attitude of Constantinople toward the West in the tenth century, an insistence on the imperial Roman pedigree.

The Magyars had from the 940s begun repeatedly to launch pillage raids in the Bulgarian Empire.

Emperor Peter I was unable to stop them and as Constantinople is unwilling to send any help he had finally allied with the Magyars and given the save passage through Bulgaria to attack imperial Thrace.

In 968, Constantinople’s Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas pays the Kievan knyaz Sviatoslav Igorevich to attack Bulgaria in response to the alliance between the Bulgarian emperor Peter I and the Magyars.

Sviatoslav Igorevich gathers sixty thousand troops and starts his campaign in the early spring of 968.

He meets the Bulgarians, who are only thirty thousand strong, near Silistra.

The battle continues the whole day and until dark the Bulgarians seemed to have overwhelmed the Kievans, but, elated by Sviatoslav's personal example, the latter are victorious due to their still larger army.

The Bulgarians retreat to the Silistra fortress and withstand the following siege.

The Rus' forces continue their victorious campaign and though they fail to take Silistra, they seize eighty other fortresses.

Sviatoslav is eventually forced to return to Kiev after Bulgarian diplomacy inspires the Pechenegs to besiege his capital.

Various synods are held before the emperors leave Rome for the south of Italy, in which, sometimes at their request, John XIII takes several German monasteries under his special protection, or decides that in some cases they are to remain forever “under the patronage (mundiburdium) of the kings or emperors.” (Mann, Horace K., The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Vol.

IV: The Popes in the Days of Feudal Anarchy, 891-999 (1910); pgs.

290-291).

With Otto I seeking a marriage alliance with Constantinople through his son and an imperial princess, John XIII lends his support to Otto’s cause.

He writes a letter to the Eastern Emperor, Nikephoros II Phokas, but ends up insulting him by referring to him, not as “Emperor of the Romans”, but as “Emperor of the Greeks”.

As his price for the marriage, Otto demands a dowry from the Eastern Empire, that of the Themes of Longobardia and Calabria.

Nikephoros retorts by instead demanding the restitution of the Exarchate of Ravenna, which includes Rome and the Papal States, as the price for the imperial marriage.

When negotiations break down, Nikephoros refuses to write to John XIII in his own hand, instead sending him a threatening letter written by his brother, Leo Phokas the Younger.

The brothers Pandulf and Landulf had taken part in the imperial campaign of 968, but Landulf retires in illness and dies at Benevento leaving two sons: Pandulf and Landulf.

Even though Pandulf is with the German emperor on the border of Calabria when news of Landulf's death reaches him, he quickly returns to Benevento and associates with him his own eldest son Landulf, who is crowned prince in the church of Sancta Sophia, before rejoining the imperial campaign.

In this year, Otto leaves the siege of Bari in the charge of Pandulf.

The Fatimids having secured their western borders, the way to Egypt is now clear the more so given the state of crisis that the incumbent Ikhshidid dynasty now finds itself in and the inability of the Abbasids to counterattack.

As early as 966, al-Mu'izz had prepared a fresh invasion of Egypt, but it had reportedly been delayed at the request of his mother, who wished to make a pilgrimage to Mecca first.

Her honorable treatment by the local ruler, the vizier Abu al-Misk Kafur, when she passed through Egypt had induced the caliph to postpone the invasion until after Kafur's death.

Sviatoslav declares his intention of establishing a Russo-Bulgarian empire with its capital at Pereyaslavets (now Perejaslav-Chmel'nickij) on the Danube River.

Transferring his capital here in 969, …