Zarathustra wrote:
The Cyrillic alphabet, for example, was created by Catholic missionaries to Russia and based largely off the Greek and Roman alphabets.
Blah. Time for lame history pedantry....
It was actually Orthodox Christians, not Catholics (though I suppose you could just be using Catholic as a synonym for Christian). While the East-West Schism didn't actually occur until 1054, by the 860s there was already a lot of tension between Rome and Constantinople due to much bitching over the addition of a single word to the Nicene Creed. Therefore while Eastern and Western Christianity weren't officially split it can be argued that they differed enough for there to be two seperate Christian faiths in Europe at the time.
Secondly, Saints Cyril and Methodius actually created the Cyrillic script for the Moravians as part of their mission to convert the Moravians in 863. For some reason it had been decided that the people should be able to hear the church service and read the bible in their own language, Slavonic. Side note: in 869 C&M were called to Rome for a dressing down by the pope, he died before their arrival, the new pope however commended them and sanctioned the Slavonic liturgy, 'tis strange how 600 years later the pope goes anal about the bible being translated into vernacular languages.
So it wasn't the Russians that Cyrillic was originally created for, it was the Moravians.
However it was decided that Cyrillic was to be used for the Russians, because they spoke a Slavonic language, when the grand prince of Kiev converted to the Orthodox faith in 988, bringing along all his subjects for the ride.
Ah fuck it, funky side tangent:
When Grand Prince Vladimir decided to dump polytheism he noticed he had four choices: Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. So he sends representatives to the four religions so he can find out which would be best for him to convert to. When the representative he sent to Germany to find out about Catholicism returned his was informed that the religion was very ritualised, cold and to top it off the services would be in latin, Vladimir decides to avoid catholicism. The representative he sent to the Jews also returned with a negative report he was informed that god had been angry at their forefathers and had scattered them among the gentiles on account of their sins. Vladimir asked that if God loved the Jews, they wouldn't be dispersed in foreign lands. Deciding that he'd rather keep his kingdom he scratched Judaism off the list.
His represntative to the Muslims didn't have much better to offer: hearing of Islam's prohibition of drinking he said, "Drinking is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure." When the representatives sent to Constantinople returned their comment was that during the Orthodox service they didn't know whether they were on heaven or on earth.
End funky tangent.
Well *I* thought it was funky, trust a prince to go for the religion with all the shiny pictures on the walls, incense and whatnot. Defintely one of the more amusing stories in history, up there with the Diet of Worms....