Kievan Rus'

Kievan Rus' was the first major East Slavic state and the political and cultural foundation from which the later nations of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus trace their origins.

It emerged in the ninth century from a fusion of Scandinavian (Varangian) traders and warriors known as the Rus' with the East Slavic and Finnic peoples of the river systems of Eastern Europe. According to the medieval chronicles, the state was consolidated in 882 CE when Oleg, successor to the semi-legendary Varangian prince Rurik, seized control of Kyiv (Kiev) and united it with Novgorod to the north, establishing the city on the Dnieper as the capital of a realm that grew rich by controlling the trade routes linking the Baltic and Scandinavia with the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world. Kievan Rus' was loosely organised as a federation of principalities ruled by members of the Rurikid dynasty under the nominal authority of the grand prince of Kyiv. The defining moment of its history was the Christianisation of the realm: around 988 the grand prince Vladimir the Great adopted Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium and made it the state religion, decisively orienting the Rus' toward Byzantine civilisation and bringing literacy, ecclesiastical art, architecture, and the Cyrillic-based written culture. Under Vladimir and especially his son Yaroslav the Wise in the eleventh century, Kievan Rus' reached its cultural and political height, with codified law (the Russkaya Pravda), the building of great churches such as the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kyiv, and dynastic marriages linking the Rurikids to royal houses across Europe. From the late eleventh and twelfth centuries the state weakened as it fragmented into numerous rival principalities, with succession disputes, internal warfare, and the decline of the old trade routes eroding the primacy of Kyiv. This disunity left the Rus' lands fatally vulnerable to the Mongol invasion. Between 1237 and 1240 the armies of Batu Khan overran the principalities one by one, and the sack of Kyiv in 1240 is generally taken to mark the end of Kievan Rus', after which the Rus' lands fell under the domination of the Golden Horde.

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