Kievan Rus and the culture of Europe

By Charlemagne’s decree, schools were opened at churches for ordinary children, and at court scholars such as Alcuin and Einhard formed the palace academy. Byzantium preserved ancient Greek learning: a higher school opened in Constantinople in the 9th century and a university in the 11th; the incendiary “Greek fire”, invented in the 7th century, was used in naval battles. Byzantine art is known for mosaics, frescoes and icons, and the dome of Hagia Sophia is counted among the greatest buildings of the age. In western Europe the Romanesque style spread, with thick walls and small windows under round arches. Schools taught the “seven liberal arts”: the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), and books were copied by hand on parchment in monasteries. In the 9th century the monks Cyril and Methodius created an alphabet for the Slavic language (the Glagolitic), and later their pupils developed the Cyrillic alphabet on the basis of Greek letters.