During the 850s and 860s a momentous event took place showing the possibilities and dangers of alternative conversions; it must have stimulated the imperial Church’s moves beyond the frontiers. The entire people of a powerful and strategically important kingdom to the northeast of the Black Sea, the Khazars, were led by their khan to convert to Judaism, and no amount of persuasion by some of Photios’s ablest advocates of Christianity could change the Khan’s mind
