Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia

Galicia–Volhynia was a medieval Rus' state in the lands that are now western Ukraine, with fringes in today's Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Lithuania. Formed around 1199 when Prince Roman Mstislavich of Volhynia also took Galicia, it became, with Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal, one of the three main powers to emerge from the break-up of Kievan Rus'. Its ruler Daniel was crowned king in 1253, and the state lasted until Poland and Lithuania divided it in the mid-fourteenth century.

Volhynia, centred on the town of Volodymyr, had its own princes from the late tenth or eleventh century, and a branch of the descendants of Vladimir Monomakh settled there after 1118. Galicia, around Halych on the upper Dniester, was formed between 1124 and 1144 by uniting several smaller principalities. Both grew rich in the twelfth century on salt and on trade between the Black Sea and central Europe, and in Galicia this wealth made the boyars, the great landowners, unusually powerful.

When Galicia's princely line died out in 1198 or 1199, the Galician boyars invited Roman of Volhynia, expecting a distant ruler. Instead he curbed their power. Roman defeated a coalition of Rus' princes, took Kiev in 1200 and campaigned against the Cumans, briefly becoming the most powerful prince in Rus'. His death in battle against the Poles at Zawichost in 1205 opened nearly forty years of turmoil, in which boyars, Rus' princes, the Kingdom of Hungary and Poland competed for the throne. A boyar, Volodyslav Kormylchych, even ruled Galicia for a time, and Hungarian princes held it in the 1210s and 1220s.

Roman's son Daniel first secured Volhynia, then took Galicia in 1238. He captured Kiev in 1239, shortly before the Mongol invasion devastated it and many other Rus' towns. In 1245 Daniel and his brother Vasylko defeated Polish and Hungarian forces at Yaroslavl, securing the whole state. A year later he travelled to Sarai and accepted the overlordship of the Golden Horde; historians still debate whether this was tactical or a genuine submission. Seeking Western support against the Mongols, he was crowned "King of Rus'" by a papal legate at Dorohochyn in 1253, though his church remained independent of Rome. In 1260 a Mongol army forced him to tear down his new fortifications.

Daniel's reign is often described as a golden age. Towns grew, German and Armenian settlers arrived, and the Galician–Volhynian Chronicle was written. Daniel made Chełm his capital; his son Leo, who ruled from 1264, moved it to Lviv in 1272. Leo worked closely with the Tatar leader Nogai and joined Mongol raids into Poland and Hungary, but Tatar armies also ravaged his lands, sacking Lviv in 1288.

Leo's successors lost Lublin to Poland in 1302. When the brothers Andrew and Leo II died in 1323, the native dynasty ended. The boyars chose a Polish prince, Bolesław, who became Orthodox and took the name Yuri II, but they poisoned him in 1340. Casimir III of Poland then attacked, and by 1349 he had annexed Galicia, while Volhynia stayed with the Lithuanian prince Liubartas, who had held it since the 1320s.

Galicia became the Ruthenian Voivodeship of the Polish crown in 1434, and Volhynia became a Lithuanian province in 1452; both were later part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Latin title "king of Galicia and Lodomeria", first used by Hungarian kings, was later taken up by the Habsburgs. Ukrainian historians see the state as a continuation of the Rus' tradition and an important stage in their national history.

Our 1200 map shows the state, labelled the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia since it became a kingdom only in 1253, between Hungary, Poland and the other Rus' principalities.