Yaroslav the Wise and the Russkaya Pravda
Yaroslav won the throne the way Rurikid princes usually did, by outlasting his brothers in a civil war, and then governed for thirty-five years over the largest state in Europe by area. The reign is the high point of Kievan Rus by every measure available. He destroyed the Pecheneg confederation outside Kiev in 1036 and removed the steppe threat for two generations. He built Saint Sophia in Kiev with Byzantine mosaicists, in deliberate imitation of the church of the same name in Constantinople, and a second at Novgorod. He founded schools and the first library in Rus, had Greek works translated into Slavonic, and in 1051 had a Russian rather than a Greek appointed metropolitan - a quiet assertion that the church here need not be run from abroad. The Russkaya Pravda, issued in his name, is the earliest surviving Russian law code: it replaced the blood feud with a tariff of compensation, graded by the status of the victim, and it is the foundation of Russian legal writing. His diplomacy ran on marriage. His daughters became queens of France, Hungary and Norway, his sister queen of Poland, his sons married into Byzantium and the German empire, and Harald Hardrada courted Elisabeth here before collecting her on the way to England. The failure was the succession. He divided the realm among his sons under a rota by seniority, princes moving between towns as elders died, which meant every death reshuffled the whole family and every passed-over nephew had a grievance and a retinue.
- Year: 1019 CE
- Category: Political
