Yaroslav the Wise

Yaroslav, son of Vladimir the Great, fought his way to the throne of Kiev in 1019 and ruled Kievan Rus' until 1054, a reign often seen as the high point of the early Rus' state. He is remembered for the first written law of the East Slavs, the Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Kiev, and a web of marriages that tied his family to the royal houses of Europe.

Little is known of his early life. He was born around 978, and the Primary Chronicle names his mother as Rogneda of Polotsk, though some scholars have questioned this; one theory makes him the son of the Byzantine princess Anna. Norse sagas call him Jarisleif the Lame, and the skeleton examined in the 1930s is reported to have confirmed a limp. His baptismal name was George, and the epithet "the Wise" is a later addition rather than a medieval title.

Vladimir first sent him to rule Rostov, in the north, where he founded the town of Yaroslavl on the Volga, and in 1010 moved him to Novgorod. Relations with his father were poor, and in 1014 Yaroslav stopped paying tribute to Kiev and hired Varangian warriors. Only Vladimir's death in July 1015 prevented open war.

The succession war that followed set Yaroslav against his half-brother Sviatopolk, backed by his father-in-law Bolesław I of Poland. Three other brothers, Boris, Gleb and Svyatoslav, were murdered; the chronicle blames Sviatopolk, though a Norse tale has been read as pointing at Yaroslav's own Varangians, and the question remains open. Yaroslav won the first round in 1016, lost Kiev in 1018 to Sviatopolk and the Poles, and finally took the city in 1019. He rewarded the Novgorodians who had supported him with privileges that helped lay the ground for the later Novgorod Republic, and probably in this period issued the law code known as the Russkaya Pravda.

His brother Mstislav of Chernigov defeated him in 1024, and the two divided the realm along the Dnieper until Mstislav died in 1036.

In 1019 Yaroslav married Ingegerd, daughter of the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung, and his foreign policy leaned on Scandinavia. In 1030 he took Tartu, in present-day Estonia, renaming it Yuryev, and in 1031 he recovered the Cherven towns from Poland. He protected the south with a line of forts against the nomadic Pechenegs, whom he defeated decisively near Kiev in 1036. In 1043 a Rus' fleet under one of his sons attacked Constantinople, beating the Byzantine fleet but losing most of its ships in a storm.

To mark the victory of 1036 he began the Cathedral of Saint Sophia in 1037, together with monasteries dedicated to his and his wife's patron saints and fortifications including the Golden Gate. In 1051 he had a Slav, Hilarion, made metropolitan of Kiev instead of a Greek appointee. Hilarion's sermon praising Vladimir and Yaroslav is often called the first work of Old East Slavic literature.

Yaroslav sheltered exiled princes and married several of his daughters to them or to other rulers: Anastasia to Andrew I of Hungary, Elisiv to the Norwegian adventurer Harald Hardrada, who had served in his army, and another daughter to Henry I of France. Before dying he urged his sons to live in peace with one another; three of them, Iziaslav, Sviatoslav and Vsevolod, reigned in Kiev in turn.

Yaroslav died on 20 February 1054 and was laid in a marble sarcophagus in Saint Sophia. When it was opened in 2009 it held only a woman's skeleton; his own remains, removed for study in 1939, appear to have been lost or taken away around the Second World War.

Our 1000 map shows the Rus' state under his father, and our 1100 map shows the Rus' lands two generations after his death.