Reexamiming Rus': The place of Kievan Rus' in Europe, ca. 800--1146

About this book

For years, the place of Rus' in history has been subservient to that of Byzantium---always considered its little brother or northern adjunct. This is primarily due to the late-tenth-century conversion of Rus' to the Byzantine form of Christianity. In Muscovite and early Tsarist Russia there was a concerted effort made by the nobility to identify themselves with the imperial legacy of Byzantium, this tradition was then projected back into the less well-documented time of Kievan Rus', and that trend continued with the writing of Russian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation attempts to overturn this misperception of Rus' as an adjunct of Byzantium, and shows Rus' as an individual player in medieval European politics with a concerted policy of focusing on the West. The links between Rus' and the West have long been known, from the ethnicity of the first Rurikids to the plethora of dynastic marriages in the eleventh century, but this evidence has been largely ignored, partly because it does not derive from Rusian sources, which often ignored contacts with the West, and partly because it does not fit the Byzantine-oriented picture of Rus' that has been developed. The relationship between Rus' and the West, then, is developed in this dissertation through both a narrative history of Rusian foreign relations and also thematic chapters dealing with Rusian ties with the rest of Europe. Recently there has been a growing interest in early Rusian scholarship to point out ties with the rest of Europe, but this dissertation will be the first to posit the theory that Rus' was making a conscious effort to connect itself with the West. This readjustment of history does nothing to diminish Byzantium, Rus', or the West. Instead, all gain from a more accurate and nuanced understanding of relations between the kingdoms and empires of medieval Europe, which creates a better understanding of social, political, and religious relations throughout medieval Europe.