From the History of Russia
Kievan Rus and Muscovy
The name of Rus was given to the land of the Eastern Slavs in the ninth century. According to early Russian chronicles, when Oleg the Prophetic sat on the throne of Kiev, he declared:”This will be the mother of the cities of Rus.” He fortified Kiev and made it into his capital.
Kiev was well placed on the principal waterway between the Gulf of Finland and the Bosphorus. Every year the merchants loaded up their boats with furs, wax, honey, amber and traveled downstream to Constantinople. Besides Kiev, other towns such as Novgorod, Rostov, Suzdal and Pskov grew up.
In 998 Prince Vladimir of Kiev (978-1015) proclaimed Christianity as the official religion and the whole population of Kiev was baptized in the waters of the River Dnieper. An important consequence of this event was the adoption of a literary language, Church Slavonic. This language used a script based on Greek with extra letters for Russian sounds, devised by Byzantine missionaries Kyril and Mephody.
This paved the way for the flowering of Kievan culture that came under Yaroslav the Wise (1019-1054).this was also the age of intensive church building that produced the great cathedrals of St Sophia (1037-1039) in Kiev and St Demetrius(1194) in Vladimir. In the monasteries, especially in the famous Pecherskaya Lavra, learned monks translated Greek and transcribed old Slavonic books.
Under Yaroslav the Wise, the first written code of Russian laws called Russkaya Pravda was issued.
After Yaroslavl’s death in 1054 the tendency to disintegration became more evident. Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh briefly reunited the land early in the 12th century, but it split apart again.
In 1169 Kiev was sacked by a group of twelve Slav princes led by Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky, who established Vladimir as his new capital in the North-East and took the title of Grand Prince.
By the 13th century the ancient Russia state had fallen apart into many small pr