The Summer of 1015, the Grand City of Kiev.
A solemn day, as the bells of the Church of the Tithes toll for the death of a great Prince.
Vladimir the Great had baptized the Rus, and opened its doors to the wider Christian world.
However, it would be his son that would bring the cultural, religious and political power
of the Rus to its historical peak.
Welcome to part four of our series on Rus history, where we will cover the reign of
Yaroslav the Wise, and the events that followed.
The Grand Prince Vladimir had had many wives, and through them, many sons - some more beloved
than others.
The most ambitious of these sons was Sviatopolk, the product of a forced union between Vladimir
and a Greek Nun.
Sviatopolk had never felt his father’s love, having been married off to the daughter of
a Polish Duke Bolesław as a youth, and sent off to vegetate in backwater Turov.
He had attempted to rebel against Vladimir as a young man, only to end up in prison.
However, he was soon released, and upon hearing about his fathers’ death, immediately bee-lined
it to Kiev to claim the throne, which he did in late 1015.
Sviatopolk soon found that he did not have the support of the Kievites, who preferred
his half-brothers, Boris and Gleb, who ruled the towns of Rostov and Murom respectively,
had always been the favourite children of Vladimir - likely to Sviatopolk’s bubbling
resentment.
Boris had always been assumed to be the heir apparent of the Kievan Rus, thus when Sviatopolk
took the capital, his boyars urged him to expel the usurper and take his rightful place
on the Kievan throne.
The Prince of Rostov declined, and replied benignly: "If any man say, I love God, and
hateth his brother, he is a liar, be it not for me to raise my hand against him.
Now that my father has passed away, let him take the place of my father in my heart."
One would imagine that this would soothe the usurpers’ paranoia, but Sviatopolk sent
his boyars, who caught Boris, brutally stabbing him and all his servants to death.
According to legend, Boris knew his murderers were coming, but had sent his soldiers away,
accepting his fate to prevent bloodshed.
The executors then caught up with Prince Gleb on the River Smyadyn.
It would be Gleb’s own cook, bribed heavily, who would slit his throat.
For these murders, Sviatopolk would earn himself the chilling epithet: The Accursed.
Like his uncle Yaropolk before him, Sviatopolk had eliminated his brothers and seized control
over the Kievan Realm.
But just like Yaropolk, he had not accounted for the old capital of Novgorod, and the young
Prince who reigned there.
Prince Yaroslav was one of the youngest children of the late Vladimir, probably born of Ragnhild
- the Polotsk Princess who Vladimir had taken at the beginning of his reign.
The young Prince spent his early years cultivating the skills needed to be a decisive leader,
maintaining relations with his relatives in Scandinavia, whose sagas referred to him as
Jarisleif the Lame, likely due to permanent limp he had received from an arrow wound in
his youth, an indication that he was experienced in battle.
Indeed, Yaroslav wasn’t afraid to assert himself: during the tail end of Vladimir’s
reign, he had refused to pay tribute, and a war between father and son was only subverted
by Vladimir’s death.
Yaroslav was shrewd enough to realize that he too would soon be under threat.
In a turn of events eerily similar to his father’s rise to power 35 years earlier,
the young Prince of Novgorod marched against his kinslaying brother with a force of northern
Slavic levies and Viking mercenaries.
Sviatopolk rallied his forces and hired a mercenary army of Pecheneg riders.
The two armies met near Lyubech.
Neither side dared to cross the Dnieper, and for weeks they stared at one another.
At some point during the stand-off, Sviatopolk’s men began taunting Yaropolk for his disability,
and calling his men carpenters, not warriors: “when we defeat you, we will make you build
us a mansion!”
Deeply angered, Yaroslavs’ soldiers poured across the river and crushed the southerners
in a vicious melee.
Yaroslav then marched into Kiev, declaring himself the new Grand Prince of all the Rus,
while Sviatopolk fled west.
Sviatopolk had powerful allies in Poland, and his father-in-law was now the King.
With Bolesław’ support, and German and Hungarian mercenaries, the Accursed Prince
returned, seizing Kiev and forcing Yaroslav back into Novgorod.
A brutal civil war would continue for another year, before Yaroslav finally defeated Sviatopolk
in a battle at the Alta River in 1019.
Sviatopolk died of illness while retreating back to Poland, and Yaroslav re-entered Kiev,
declaring himself the Grand Prince
The Kievan Rus that Yaroslav had taken control of was a vastly different land to the one
his father had inherited.
Gone was the loose tributary confederacy of old, replaced by a centralized Christian Empire.
Yaroslav knew he could not rule his realm as a Rurikid warlord, so he set about becoming
a just monarch, ruling upon the pillars of theology, learning, and law.
The old ways of rugged pagan justice were no longer suited for a Christian ruler, so
Yaroslav oversaw the composition of the first codex of Rus laws.
The death penalty became rarer, and punishments became grounded in standardized fines, imprisonment,
and confiscation.
The legal groundwork laid by Yaroslav would become known as the Russkaya Pravda - the
Russian Justice - and served as the basis of Rus law for centuries.
Yaroslav also promoted literacy among his boyars, educating their children to read,
write, and appreciate the finer points of Biblical scripture.
He built schools across his realm, and allocated large funds for the copying of manuscripts,
which was an extremely costly endeavor at the time.
His reign saw the opening of the first Rus monasteries, while Kiev soon became one of
the largest cities in Europe, a hub of international trade and higher learning rivaling the powerhouses
of Constantinople and Baghdad.
Despite this, Yaroslav’s reign was still defined by civil war and external conquests.
In 1024, his half brother, Prince Mstislav of Tmutarakan, took advantage of his absence
to launch an invasion.
While Mstislav was unable to breach the walls of the capital, he managed to subjugate the
hinterlands around it, moving his power base to Chernigov, a prosperous town right on Kiev’s
doorstep.
The Grand Prince retaliated, assisted by Norsemen sent by King Anund Jakob of Sweden: he struck
fiercely at Chernigov, but was decisively beaten by Mstislav’s army.
As a result, Yaroslav was forced to relinquish a good chunk of his realm left of the Dnieper
to his Half-Brother.
Thankfully, Yaroslav was soon able to turn his fortunes around by establishing a working
relationship with Mstislav despite their recent conflict.
Together, they launched a campaign against the Poles in 1030, retaking the Cherven cities,
which had been conquered by King Bolesław during his alliance with Sviatopolk.
Yaroslav would later establish peace with King Casimir the Restorer by marrying off
his sister, Maria Dobroniega, to the Polish Monarch in 1043.
Relations between the most powerful nations of Eastern and Western Slavs would remain
stable for a time.
Back in 1036, Mstislav had fallen sick while on a hunting trip, and died.
Taking advantage of his untimely demise, Yaroslav was able to reinstate control over the entirety
of the Rus realm; not that he had much time to rest on his laurels, as the Rus capital
of Kiev stood as a monument of opulence, tempting any war-like peoples to try and seize its
riches.
In 1036, it would be the traditional frenemies of the Rus, the Pecheneg horde, that galloped
out of their steppelands to besiege the grand capital, just as they had a half a century
earlier.
Yaroslav was in Novgorod when he heard the news.
One can only imagine the fury he must have felt.
Enough was enough - the Pechenegs had been a thorn in the side of the Rus for too long.
Yaroslav immediately rode south, forming an army made up of the men of Novgorod, Kiev,
and a large contingent of Varangians, meeting the foe outside the walls of Kiev, the where
two armies clashed.
After a grueling struggle, the Turkic horde was crushed and routed.
So decisive was this victory that from this point forward, the Pechenegs never again appeared
as a significant player in Rus history.
To commemorate his triumph, Prince Yaroslav commissioned the construction of the crown
jewel of Kiev: St. Sophia’s cathedral.
Yaroslav also undertook many outwards campaigns at the expense of the Lithuanians, Estonians,
and Karelian Finns.
At the end of his conquests, he had expanded the borders of the Kievan Rus significantly,
turning it into a true Empire.
On top of his military triumphs, the Grand Prince had also expanded the diplomatic reach
of the Kievan Rus further than ever before through a series of marriage pacts.
On top of marrying his sister to the King of Poland, his son Vsevolod was married to
Emperor Constantine IX’s daughter Anastasia, and he bequeathed his three daughters respectively
to Henry I of France, Andrew I of Hungary, and the famous adventurer King: Harald Hardrada
of Norway.
These alliances enriched the Rus by deepening their trading ties to Western Europe, integrating
the Kievan Realm into the wider Christian world.
However, as the Grand Prince grew old and weak, he began to fear for the future of his
realm.
The elderly Yaroslav had seven sons, and he soon realized that upon his death, they would
fight an endless string of civil wars.
In an attempt to prevent this, Yaroslav divided the Kievan Rus among his sons, giving each
one a piece of his realm to rule autonomously.
In practice, his eldest son Iziaslav Yaroslavich was the heir apparent to the throne of the
Grand Prince, but in practice, he was equal in power to his brothers, the Princes of Chernigov,
Pereyaslav Novgorod, Volhyn, Smolensk and Turov.
Yaroslav begged his sons to get along, and act in the common interest of the realm.
In 1054, he passed away, and the golden age of the Kievan Rus came to an end.
The first existential threat to Rus unity came in the form of thundering hooves from
the steppe.
Yaroslav had crushed the Pechenegs, but all this had accomplished was to leave their southern
grasslands open for their fiercer, more numerous cousins.
The Cumans were much like other Turkic peoples - excellent horse-archers, bellicose to a
fault.
The Rus called them Polovtsy, from the Slavic “Pole” - “field”, although there are
other etymological explanations.
They called themselves Kipchaks, and the land they took over Desht-i Kipchak.
By 1061 the Cumans had entered the Ponto-Caspian steppe and seven years later they decisively
crushed the Rus armies of Kiev, Chernigov and Pereyaslavl at the Alta River.
This allowed them to establish dominion over much of the Southern Grasslands, choking off
the Rus’ access to the upper Don, Volga, and Dnieper rivers, crucial trade routes they
had relied on for generations.
After the battle, rebellions and civil wars erupted across the realm, and a popular uprising
forced Iziaslav to flee to Poland.
A year later, he returned to Kiev with the help of the Polish army, but in 1078 he was
finally killed in battle by his nephews.
In theory, this shouldn’t have crippled the realm.
Turkic raiders and civil war were nothing new to the Rus.
Vladimir and Yaroslav had dealt with both in their time, and preserved the integrity
of their realm.
This time, however, there would be no great Prince to lead the Rus back to glory.
Other external factors led to the political and economic stagnation of the Kievan realm.
Back in 1054, the Christian World was divided by the Great Schism, when the Orthodox Patriarch
of Constantinople officially cut ties with the Catholic Pope in Rome and as fellow Orthodox
the Rus sided with the patriarch.
As a result, the trading ties that Yaroslav had once cultivated with Western Europe declined
- the Latin World came to see the Rus as heretics.
Byzantium was not the powerful ally it once was either.
In 1071, the Eastern Romans found themselves rocked to their core, when a series of civil
wars following a devastating invasion of Seljuk Turks saw them lose most of their territory.
Between that, and the Cumans cutting off the most prosperous river trade routes, the flow
of wealth into Rus lands decreased significantly.
Overall, Rus was becoming increasingly isolated.
The branches of the Rurikid family became more numerous, and since Kiev was not nearly
the hub of international trade it once was, these lesser Princes began to identify themselves
with regional interests rather than with the Rus state as a whole.
As Kiev declined, the functionally autonomous Principalities and Republics of Vladimir-Suzdal,
Novgorod, and Halych-Volhynia became the main powerhouses in the East Slavic world.
This tide of fragmentation would be stymied by Vladimir Monomakh, the last truly great
Prince of the Kievan Rus.
He managed to somewhat unite the increasingly disparate Rus Princes back under Kievan primacy
in 1095, and even managed to briefly turn the tide against the Cumans in a pair of victories
against one of their most powerful Khans, Boniak, in 1107 and 1114.
Monomakh’s reign would prove the exception to the rule, however.
The reign of his son, Prince Mstislav Vladimirovich, would be a grim return to form, seeing constant
wars with Cumans, Estonians, Lithuanians, and rebellious Rurikid Princedoms.
By the time of his death in 1132, people still paid lip service to Kiev, but the reality
was that the unity of the Rus was dead.
Despite all their troubles, their darkest days were yet to come.
Join us next time, for the episode you all knew was coming, as the riders of the Genghis
appear on the horizon.
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