Principality of Polotsk

The Principality of Polotsk was a medieval East Slavic state centred on the town of Polotsk in what is now northern Belarus. From the late tenth century it was ruled by its own branch of the Rurikid dynasty, which often kept its distance from Kiev, and at its height it stretched over much of northern and central Belarus and into south-eastern Latvia. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was drawn into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

No founding date is recorded, and the state seems to have grown gradually out of the Krivichs, a tribal union of the early East Slavs. The Primary Chronicle first names Polotsk under the year 862, among the towns of the northern Rus' realm. More than a century later the chronicle shows it ruled by Rogvolod, a Varangian said to have come "from overseas", who was drawn into the struggle for power that followed the death of Prince Sviatoslav I in 972.

Both of Sviatoslav's rival sons, Yaropolk of Kiev and Vladimir of Novgorod, sought Polotsk's support. According to the chronicle, Rogvolod's daughter Rogneda rejected a marriage offer from Vladimir, siding her family with Yaropolk. The chronicle's colourful and violent account says that Vladimir then stormed Polotsk, forced Rogneda to become his wife and killed her family, ending the local dynasty. After Vladimir's baptism in 988 and his marriage to the Byzantine princess Anna, he set his earlier wives aside. Rogneda became a nun and was sent back to the Polotsk lands with their son Izyaslav, whose descendants would rule there for two centuries. From this time the principality was Orthodox Christian, part of the wider Christianisation of Kievan Rus'.

Izyaslav died before his father and never ruled in Kiev, so under the dynastic custom of the Rus' his heirs lost any claim to the Kievan throne. The rest of Kievan Rus' came to be held by the descendants of Yaroslav the Wise, and Polotsk's princes tended to go their own way. Izyaslav's son Bryachislav, who succeeded in 1001, sacked Novgorod in 1020 but lost it again to Yaroslav and gave up some of his lands.

Polotsk flourished under Bryachislav's son Vseslav, who ruled from 1044 to 1101 and used the civil wars among the Kievan princes to act independently. The town became a trading post between the Rus' lands and Scandinavia, and Norse sagas called it the strongest fortress in Rus'. Between 1044 and 1066 Vseslav built the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, a deliberate rival to the churches of the same name in Kiev and Novgorod. Polotsk also extended its influence westwards over the ancestors of the Latvians and Lithuanians, who at first served as its auxiliaries.

After Vseslav's defeat on the river Nemiga, his imprisonment and finally his death, the principality was split among his sons into smaller states based on Minsk, Vitebsk, Drutsk and other towns. Their princes fought each other for Polotsk, and Smolensk at times claimed parts of the land. In the west, German crusaders based at Riga took the dependent principalities of Jersika and Koknese in 1209, and in 1212 Polotsk had to allow German merchants free passage. The principality escaped the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' of 1237–1239.

The Lithuanians, once auxiliaries, had broken away by 1183 and soon became the stronger partner. Polotsk became a vassal of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1240 and was formally incorporated in 1307, though it kept a measure of self-government until the 1390s. Its lands were later organised as the Polotsk Voivodeship, and the town is now in Belarus.

Our 1100 map shows the Principality of Polotsk at the end of Vseslav's long reign, on the north-western edge of Kievan Rus'.