Olga of Kiev

Olga governed Kievan Rus' as regent for her young son Sviatoslav from 945 until about 957, the first woman to rule the Rus' state. She is remembered for two things: the ruthless revenge that the chronicles say she took on the Drevlians, who had killed her husband, and her baptism as a Christian, a generation before her grandson made Christianity the religion of the realm. The Orthodox Church honours her as a saint, "Equal to the Apostles".

Her date of birth is unknown; estimates run from about 890 to 925. The Primary Chronicle, a Kievan history compiled in the 1110s, says she was of Varangian, that is Scandinavian, descent and came from Pskov. She married Igor, the prince of Kiev whom the chronicle calls the son of Rurik, and bore him a son, Sviatoslav. Little else is recorded of her early life.

In 945 Igor went to collect tribute from the Drevlians, a tribe west of Kiev. Having been paid, he returned with a small escort to demand more, and the Drevlians killed him. The Byzantine writer Leo the Deacon later claimed he was tied to two trees and torn apart, though one modern historian has suggested Leo borrowed that detail from an ancient Greek legend.

The Primary Chronicle tells Olga's response as a sequence of four tricks. When the Drevlians proposed that she marry their prince, Mal, she had their envoys buried alive in their own boat, burned a second delegation in a bathhouse, and had her men slaughter Drevlians drunk at a funeral feast for Igor; the chronicle puts the dead at 5,000. She then besieged their town of Iskorosten for a year and finally burned it by tying smouldering sulphur to pigeons and sparrows, which carried fire back to the roofs. These episodes belong to the chronicle tradition, written more than 150 years later, and historians treat them with caution. The Russian writer Boris Akunin, for example, has argued that only the first killing is plausible, although there is no doubt that Olga brought the Drevlians back under Kiev's rule.

What can be said more securely is that Olga reorganised the gathering of tribute, known as the poliudie, putting it on a regular footing, and set up a network of trading and administrative posts, called pogosti, along rivers such as the Msta and the Luga. This is often described as the first recorded legal reform in Eastern Europe. She kept Kiev in hand while Sviatoslav was away on campaign and helped defend the city when it was besieged in 968.

In the 950s Olga visited Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, and was received by Emperor Constantine VII. Three sources describe the visit and they disagree. The emperor's Book of Ceremonies records her reception and retinue but says nothing of baptism; the historian John Skylitzes says she was baptised there; and the Primary Chronicle adds a romantic tale in which the emperor wished to marry her, a story most historians regard as invention, not least because Constantine already had a wife. Church Slavonic tradition dates her baptism to 957, while Byzantine sources suggest she was already Christian. She took the baptismal name Helena.

She failed to convert Sviatoslav, who feared his warriors would mock him, though he agreed not to persecute Christians. In 959 she also sent envoys to the German king Otto I asking for a bishop, but the cleric who arrived in 961 was driven out.

Olga died in Kiev in July 969, shortly after a siege of the city by the Pechenegs, and at her request was buried by a priest without a pagan funeral feast. Her grandson Vladimir the Great adopted Christianity in 988, completing the Christianisation of Kievan Rus' that she had begun. She was formally recognised as a saint by the Russian Church in 1547 and is honoured in both Russia and Ukraine.

Our 900 and 1000 maps bracket her lifetime, showing the Rus' state centred on Kiev before and after her regency.