1.
Alexander Nevsky
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Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky served as Prince of Novgorod, Grand Prince of Kiev and Grand Prince of Vladimir during some of the most difficult times in Kievan Rus history. He was canonized as a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church by Metropolite Macarius in 1547, as it was told by the prophet Isaiah, Thus sayeth the Lord, I appoint the princes because they are sacred and I direct them. He was taller than others and his voice reached the people as a trumpet, and his face was like the face of Joseph and his power was a part of the power of Samson and God gave him the wisdom of Solomon. This Prince Alexander, he used to defeat but was never defeated, born in Pereslavl-Zalessky, Alexander was the second son of Prince Yaroslav Vsevolodovich and Rostislava Mstislavna, daughter of Kievan Rus Prince Mstislav Mstislavich the Bold. Alexander seemed to have no chance of claiming the throne of Vladimir, in 1236, however, he was summoned by the Novgorodians to become knyaz of Novgorod and, as their military leader, to defend their northwest lands from Swedish and German invaders. According to the Novgorod Chronicle written in the 14th cent, the Neva battle of 1240 saved Novgorod from a full-scale invasion from the West. Because of this battle, 19-year-old Alexander was given the sobriquet Nevsky and he would soon have to leave Novgorod because of this conflict. This supposed battle is not mentioned in any Swedish or other source, the supposed Swedish commander was called Spiridon which is an Orthodox, not Scandinavian name. Furthermore, Sweden was on the brink of war with Norway ever since the Norwegians infamous Värmland expedition in 1225, relations improved only after the Treaty of Lödöse in 1249, which was forged by the newly empowered Birger Jarl. Before the treaty, Norway remained an ally of the folkungs, giving them refuge and providing men, in this situation, it seems unlikely that Sweden could have been able to organize a major expedition against Novgorod. After Pskov had been invaded by the Germans and Estonians, the Novgorod authorities sent for Alexander, in spring of 1241 he returned from his exile, gathered an army, and drove out the invaders. Alexander and his men faced the Livonian heavy cavalry led by the bishop of Dorpat Hermann, Nevsky faced the enemy on the ice of the Lake Peipus and defeated the German knights and Estonian infantry during the Battle of the Ice on 5 April 1242. Alexander’s victory was a significant event in the history of the Russia, foot soldiers of Novgorod had surrounded and defeated an army of knights, mounted on horseback and clad in thick armour. Tactical military considerations aside, Alexanders victory was an important milestone in the development of Muscovite Russia, after the Livonian invasion, Nevsky continued to strengthen Russia’s Northwest. He sent his envoys to Norway and, as a result, Alexander led his army to Finland and successfully routed the Swedes, who had made another attempt to block the Baltic Sea from the Russians in 1256. Nevsky proved to be a cautious and far-sighted politician, historians seem to be unsure about Alexander’s behavior when it came to his relations with Mongols. He may have thought that Catholicism presented a more tangible threat to Russian national identity than paying a tribute to the Khan, Alexander tried to strengthen his authority at the expense of the boyars and at the same time suppress any anti-Mongol uprisings in the country. According to one interpretation, Alexander’s intentions were to protect scattered principalities of what would become Muscovy from repeated invasions by the Mongol army
2.
Golden Horde
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The Golden Horde was a Mongol and later Turkicized khanate established in the 13th century and originating as the northwestern sector of the Mongol Empire. With the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire after 1259 it became a functionally separate khanate and it is also known as the Kipchak Khanate or as the Ulus of Jochi. After the death of Batu Khan in 1255, his dynasty flourished for a century, until 1359. The Hordes military power peaked during the reign of Uzbeg, who adopted Islam, the territory of the Golden Horde at its peak included most of Eastern Europe from the Urals to the Danube River, and extended east deep into Siberia. In the south, the Golden Hordes lands bordered on the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, the khanate experienced violent internal political disorder beginning in 1359, before it briefly reunited under Tokhtamysh. However, soon after the 1396 invasion of Timur, the founder of the Timurid Empire, at the start of the 15th century the Horde began to fall apart. By 1466 it was being referred to simply as the Great Horde, within its territories there emerged numerous predominantly Turkic-speaking khanates. These internal struggles allowed the northern state of Muscovy to rid itself of the Tatar Yoke at the Great stand on the Ugra river in 1480. The Crimean Khanate and the Kazakh Khanate, the last remnants of the Golden Horde, in any event, it was not until the 16th century that Russian chroniclers begin explicitly using the term Golden Horde to refer to this particular successor khanate of the Mongol Empire. The first known use of the term, in 1565, in the Russian chronicle History of Kazan, applied it to the Ulus of Batu and its left wing was referred to as the Blue Horde in Russian chronicles and as the White Horde in Timurid sources. Western scholars have tended to follow the Timurid sources nomenclature and call the left wing the White Horde, the khanate apparently used the term White Horde to refer to its right wing, which was situated in Batus home base in Sarai and controlled the ulus. However, the designations Golden Horde, Blue Horde, and White Horde have not been encountered in the sources of the Mongol period. At his death in 1227, Genghis Khan divided the Mongol Empire amongst his four sons as appanages, Jochi was the eldest, but he died six months before Genghis. In 1235, Batu with the great general Subedei began an invasion westwards, first conquering the Bashkirs, from there he conquered some of the southern steppes of present-day Ukraine in 1237, forcing many of the local Cumans to retreat westward. The military campaign against the Kypchaks and Cumans had started under Jochi, by 1239 a large portion of Cumans were driven out of the Crimea peninsula, and it became one of the appanages of the Mongol Empire. The remnants of the Crimean Cumans survived in the Crimean mountains, moving north, Batu began the Mongol invasion of Rus and for three years subjugated the principalities of former Kievan Rus, whilst his cousins Möngke, Kadan, and Güyük moved southwards into Alania. Using the migration of the Cumans as their casus belli, the Mongols continued west, raiding Poland and Hungary and culminating in the battles of Legnica, in 1241, however, Ögedei Khan died in the Mongolia homeland. Batu turned back from his siege of Vienna to take part in disputing the succession, the Mongol armies would never again travel so far west
3.
Vladimir, Russia
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Vladimir is a city and the administrative center of Vladimir Oblast, Russia, located on the Klyazma River,200 kilometers to the east of Moscow. It is served by a railway and the M7 motorway, Vladimir was one of the medieval capitals of Russia, with significant buildings surviving from the 12th century. Two of its Russian Orthodox cathedrals, a monastery, and associated buildings have been designated as among the White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal, in the past, the city was also known as Vladimir-on-Klyazma and Vladimir-Zalessky, to distinguish it from another Vladimir in Volhynia. Traditionally, the date of Vladimir has been acknowledged as 1108. This view attributes the founding of the city, and its name, to Vladimir Monomakh and it is named there as Volodymyr. On the 17th centuries maps, it was identified as Wolodimer, being established long after the city of Volodymyr in Volhynia, initially it was named Vladimir-on-Klyazma. In 1958, the 850th anniversary of the city foundation was celebrated, in the 1990s, a new opinion developed that the city is older than this. The neighboring town of Suzdal, for instance, was mentioned in 1024 and its 12th-century inhabitants alluded to Vladimir as a young town and treated its rulers with arrogance. In the words of a chronicle, they said that the people of Vladimir were their kholops. In the seniority conflicts of the 12th and early 13th centuries, Vladimir was repeatedly described as a young town compared to Suzdal, nevertheless, the Charter of Vladimir, the basic law of the city passed in 2005, explicitly mentions 990 as the date of the citys foundation. The citys most historically significant events occurred after the turn of the 12th century, under Dolgorukys son, Andrey Bogolyubsky, the city became the center of the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality. It had a Golden Age, which lasted until the Mongol invasion of Rus in 1237, during this time, Vladimir enjoyed immense growth and prosperity. Andrey oversaw the building of the citys Golden Gates and the Dormition Cathedral, in 1164, Andrey attempted to establish a new metropolitanate in Vladimir, separate from that of Kiev. He was rebuffed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, scores of Russian, German, and Georgian masons worked on Vladimirs white stone cathedrals, monastery, towers, and palaces. Unlike any other buildings, their exterior was elaborately carved with high relief stone sculptures. Only three of these edifices stand today, the Dormition Cathedral, the Cathedral of Saint Demetrius, and they are included among the White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. During Andreys reign, a palace in Bogolyubovo was built, as well as the world-famous Church of the Intercession on the Nerl. Andrey was assassinated at his palace at Bogolyubovo in 1175, Vladimir was besieged by the Mongol-Tatars of the Golden Horde under Batu Khan
4.
Old East Slavic
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Old East Slavic, Old Ruthenian, Old Rusian was a language used in the 10th–15th centuries by East Slavs in Kievan Rus and states which evolved after the collapse of Kievan Rus. Dialects of it were spoken, though not exclusively, in the area occupied by Belarus, central and northern Ukraine. Linguists from each of the three East Slavic countries tend to treat Old East Slavic as the predecessor of their own language. The Russian drevnerusskij jazyk means Old Rus’ian as well, Rusian is similarly used by some western scholars such as Horace Lunt. The language was a descendant of the Proto-Slavic language and faithfully retained many of its features, a striking innovation in the evolution of this language was the development of so-called pleophony, which came to differentiate the newly evolving East Slavic from other Slavic dialects. For instance, Common Slavic *gordъ settlement, town was reflected as OESl. gorodъ, Common Slavic *melko milk > OESl. moloko, other Slavic dialects are differed by resolving the closed-syllable clusters *eRC and *aRC as liquid metathesis, or by no change at all. Since extant written records of the language are sparse, it is difficult to assess the level of its unity, in consideration of the number of tribes and clans that constituted Kievan Rus, it is probable that there were many dialects of Old East Slavonic. Nonetheless, by 1150 it had more unity than any other branch of Slavic, with time, it evolved into several more diversified forms, which were the predecessors of the modern Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn and Ukrainian languages. The Ukrainian branch split away first, between 1200 and 1500, whereas Russian later separated from Belarusian by 1700, each of these languages preserves much of the Old East Slavic grammar and vocabulary. The Old Church Slavonic language was introduced, documentation of the language of this period is scanty, making it difficult at best fully to determine the relationship between the literary language and its spoken dialects. There are references in Arab and Byzantine sources to pre-Christian Slavs in European Russia using some form of writing, although the Glagolitic alphabet was briefly introduced, as witnessed by church inscriptions in Novgorod, it was soon entirely superseded by the Cyrillic. The following excerpts illustrate two of the most famous literary monuments, the spelling of the original excerpt has been partly modernized. The translations are best attempts at being literal, not literary,1110, from the Laurentian Codex,1377, Early language, fall of the yers in progress or arguably complete. South Slavic features include времѧньнъıх bygone, modern R прошлых, modern Ukr минулих, correct use of perfect and aorist, єсть пошла is/has come, нача began Note the style of punctuation. 1200, from the Pskov manuscript, fifteenth cent, illustrates the sung epics, with typical use of metaphor and simile. The Old East Slavic language developed a certain literature of its own, though much of it was influenced as regards style, the earliest dated specimen of Old East Slavic must be considered the written Slovo o zakone i blagodati, by Hilarion, metropolitan of Kiev. In this work there is a panegyric on Prince Vladimir of Kiev and this subtle and graceful oration admirably conforms to the precepts of the Byzantine eloquence. It is rivalled by another panegyric on Vladimir, written a decade later by Yakov the Monk, from the writings of Theodosius we see that many pagan habits were still in vogue among the people
5.
Russian Orthodox Church
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The Russian Orthodox Church, alternatively legally known as the Moscow Patriarchate, is one of the autocephalous Eastern Orthodox churches, in full communion with other Eastern Orthodox patriarchates. The Primate of the ROC is the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus and it also exercises ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the autonomous Church of Japan and the Orthodox Christians resident in the Peoples Republic of China. The ROC branches in Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Moldova and Ukraine since the 1990s enjoy various degrees of self-government, in Ukraine, ROC has tensions with schismatic groups supported by the current government, while it enjoys the position of numerically dominant religious organisation. The ROC should also not be confused with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, headquartered in New York, New York, the two Churches reconciled on May 17,2007, the ROCOR is now a self-governing part of the Russian Orthodox Church. According to one of the legends, Andrew reached the location of Kiev. The spot where he erected a cross is now marked by St. Andrews Cathedral. By the end of the first millennium AD, eastern Slavic lands started to come under the influence of the Eastern Roman Empire. There is evidence that the first Christian bishop was sent to Novgorod from Constantinople either by Patriarch Photius or Patriarch Ignatios, by the mid-10th century, there was already a Christian community among Kievan nobility, under the leadership of Byzantine Greek priests, although paganism remained the dominant religion. Princess Olga of Kiev was the first ruler of Kievan Rus′ to convert to Christianity and her grandson, Vladimir of Kiev, made Rus officially a Christian state. The Kievan church was a metropolitanate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Ecumenical patriarch appointed the metropolitan, who usually was a Greek. The Metropolitans residence was located in Kiev itself, the capital of the medieval Rus state. Following the tribulations of the Mongol invasion, the Russian Church was pivotal in the survival, despite the politically motivated murders of Mikhail of Chernigov and Mikhail of Tver, the Mongols were generally tolerant and even granted tax exemption to the Church. Such holy figures as Sergius of Radonezh and Metropolitan Alexis helped the country to withstand years of Tatar oppression, the Trinity monastery founded by Sergius of Radonezh became the setting for the flourishing of spiritual art, exemplified by the work of Andrey Rublev, among others. The followers of Sergius founded four hundred monasteries, thus extending the geographical extent of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. However, the Moscow Prince Vasili II rejected the act of the Council of Florence brought to Moscow by Isidore in March 1441, Isidore was in the same year removed from his position as an apostate and expelled from Moscow. The Russian metropolitanate remained effectively vacant for the few years due largely to the dominance of Uniates in Constantinople then. In December 1448, Jonas, a Russian bishop, was installed by the Council of Russian bishops in Moscow as Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia without the consent from Constantinople. Subsequently, there developed a theory in Moscow that saw Moscow as the Third Rome, the successor to Constantinople
6.
Grand Duke of Vladimir
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The Grand Duke of Vladimir was a prince during the Kievan Rus and after its collapse. He ruled territory approximately bounded by the Volga, Oka and Northern Dvina rivers and its capital was Vladimir during 1157-1238. Vladimir city was founded by a Kievan prince Vladimir Monomakh in 1108 and was destroyed by a Mongol invasion in 1238, the second important city was Suzdal, also destroyed by Mongols. The Grand Duke Yuri Dolgorukii, the son of Vladimir Monomakh. Vladimir-Suzdal began the consolidation of Russian lands, completed by Muscovy. Vladimir was founded in the 12th century, the principality was overrun by the Mongols under Batu Khan in 1242. He and his successors asserted suzerainty over it until 1328, during this period, Vladimir became the chief town of the Russian settlements in the basin of the Oka and it clashed with the new principality of Moscow, to which it finally succumbed in 1328. It began to decay in the 14th century, traditionally, Vladimir-Suzdal is perceived as a cradle of the Great Russian language and nationality and gradually evolved into the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Since 1332 the title of the Grand Princes of Vladimir passed to the Grand Dukes of Moscow
7.
Grand Duchy of Moscow
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The Grand Duchy of Moscow, or Grand Principality of Moscow, was a late medieval Rus principality centered on Moscow and the predecessor state of the early modern Tsardom of Russia. The state originated with Daniel I, who inherited Moscow in 1283, eclipsing and it later annexed the Novgorod Republic in 1478 and the Grand Duchy of Tver in 1485. After the Mongol invasion of Rus, Muscovy was a vassal to the Mongol ruled Golden Horde until 1480. By his marriage to the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, he established Muscovy as the state of the Roman Empire. Ivans successor Vasili III also enjoyed success, gaining Smolensk from Lithuania in 1512. Vasilis son Ivan IV was an infant at his fathers death in 1533 and he was crowned in 1547, assuming the title of tsar together with the proclamation of Tsardom of Russia. As with many states the country had no particular official name. The Duke of Moscow or the Sovereign of Moscow were common short titles, in rivalry with other duchies Moscow dukes also designated themselves as the Grand Dukes, claiming a higher position in the hierarchy of Russian dukes. During the territorial growth and later acquisitions, the title became rather lengthy. Since the 14th century various Moscow dukes added of all Rus to their titles, after the title of Russian metropolitans, Dmitry Shemyaka was the first Moscow duke who minted coins with the title the Sovereign of all Rus. Under the Polish-Lithuanian influence the country began to be called Muscovy in Western Europe, the first appearances of the term were in an Italian document of 1500. Initially Moscovia was the Latinized name of the city of Moscow itself, not of the state, later it acquired its meaning and has been used alongside of the older name. The term Muscovy persisted in the West until the beginning of the 18th century and is used in historical contexts. When the Mongols invaded the lands of Kievan Rus in the 13th century, the first ruler of the principality of Moscow, Daniel I, was the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky of Vladimir-Suzdal. He started to expand his principality by seizing Kolomna and securing the bequest of Pereslavl-Zalessky to his family, daniels son Yuriy controlled the entire basin of the Moskva River and expanded westward by conquering Mozhaisk. He then forged an alliance with the overlord of the Rus principalities, Uzbeg Khan of the Golden Horde, the Khan allowed Yuriy to claim the title of Grand Duke of Vladimir-Suzdal, a position which allowed him to interfere in the affairs of the Novgorod Republic to the north-west. Yuriys successor, Ivan I, managed to retain the title of Grand Duke by cooperating closely with the Mongols and by collecting tribute and taxes from other Rus principalities on their behalf. This relationship enabled Ivan to gain regional ascendancy, particularly over Moscows chief rival, the city of Tver
8.
History of Russia
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The History of Russia begins with that of the Eastern Slavs. The traditional beginning of Russian history is 862 A. D. Kievan Rus, the state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning with the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus ultimately disintegrated as a state because of the Mongol invasion of Rus in 1237–1240, after the 13th century, Moscow became a cultural center. By the 18th century, the Tsardom of Russia had become the huge Russian Empire, expansion in the western direction sharpened Russias awareness of its separation from much of the rest of Europe and shattered the isolation in which the initial stages of expansion had occurred. Successive regimes of the 19th century responded to such pressures with a combination of halfhearted reform, peasant revolts were common, and all were fiercely suppressed. Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861, but the peasant fared poorly, from its first years, government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communists, as the Bolsheviks called themselves, beginning in March 1918. The Russian Federation began in January 1992 as the successor to the USSR. Russia retained its nuclear arsenal but lost its superpower status, Russias treatment of Ukraine led to severe economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union. In 2006,1. 5-million-year-old Oldowan flint tools were discovered in the Dagestan Akusha region of the north Caucasus, arctic Russia was reached by 40,000 years ago. During the prehistoric eras the vast steppes of Southern Russia were home to tribes of nomadic pastoralists, in classical antiquity, the Pontic Steppe was known as Scythia. Remnants of these long gone steppe cultures were discovered in the course of the 20th century in places as Ipatovo, Sintashta, Arkaim. In the latter part of the 8th century BCE, Greek merchants brought classical civilization to the trade emporiums in Tanais, gelonus was described by Herodotos as a huge earth- and wood-fortified grad inhabited around 500 BCE by Heloni and Budini. At about the 2nd century CE Goths migrated to the Black Sea, and in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, a Turkic people, the Khazars, ruled the lower Volga basin steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas through to the 8th century. Noted for their laws, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism, the Khazars were the commercial link between the Baltic and the Muslim Abbasid empire centered in Baghdad. They were important allies of the Byzantine Empire, and waged a series of wars against the Arab Caliphates. In the 8th century, the Khazars embraced Judaism, some of the ancestors of the modern Russians were the Slavic tribes, whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the Pripet Marshes. The Early East Slavs gradually settled Western Russia in two waves, one moving from Kiev towards present-day Suzdal and Murom and another from Polotsk towards Novgorod, scandinavian Norsemen, known as Vikings in Western Europe and Varangians in the East, combined piracy and trade throughout Northern Europe. In the mid-9th century, they began to venture along the waterways from the eastern Baltic to the Black, thus, the first East Slavic state, Rus, emerged in the 9th century along the Dnieper River valley
9.
Early Slavs
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The first written use of the name Slavs dates to the sixth century, when the Slavic tribes inhabited a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe. By that century, native Iranian ethnic groups had been absorbed by the regions Slavic population, over the next two centuries, the Slavs expanded southwest toward the Balkans and the Alps and northeast towards the Volga River. Beginning in the century, the Slavs gradually converted to Christianity. The meaning of Slav depends on the context in which it is used, the word can refer to a culture living north of the River Danube, east of the River Elbe, and west of the River Vistula during the 530s CE. Slav is also an identifier for the group shared by these cultures. When discussing evidence used to construct a history of the Slavs, archaeologically, early Slavic physical evidence ranges from hill forts, ceramic pots and fragments to abodes. However, archaeologists face difficulties distinguishing Slavic and non-Slavic findings, many of these findings are inaccurately radiocarbon-dated or so isolated that they do not reflect organized Slavic settlement. Although a number of sources describe the Slavs, there are problems with using the texts to build upon available knowledge of the early Slavs. Useful historical information about the Slavs from them is cryptic or does not identify their source, the works tend to discuss the Slavs only in terms of their effects on surrounding empires, particularly the Byzantines and the Franks. The variety of names referring to the Slavs, such as Antes, Sclaveni, and Venethi, place names have changed, or no longer survive, and most texts are second-hand accounts or describe an encounter with the Slavs years, decades, or centuries after it occurred. Earlier texts contextualize the Slavs early history and development, but those written long after an event are less reliable, the Slavs were described by their neighbors as Antes, Sclaveni, and Venethi in texts written during and after the 500s. The concept of ethnicity during this period was fluid, more than one ethnicity would be ascribed to a group and this map of Slavic settlement during the 6th century relative to their neighbors drawn from written fragments, omits source information which contradicted Parczewskis conclusions. The association by archaeologists of pot and burial styles with ethnonyms, Ethnic identification can be subjective, especially in a region where many tribal groups identified themselves as distinct from one another. The history of the early Slavs is inseparable from political agendas underlying much 19th- and 20th-century archaeological, linguistic, according to Florin Curta, the creation of such a history was a function of both ethnic formation and ethnic identification. The Slavic languages, with about 300 million speakers in 2006, are a branch of the Indo-European language family. All known Slavic languages share a number of features, which suggests that they evolved from mutually intelligible dialects spoken in a relatively restricted core area, although the former common language is not attested in written sources, it can be reconstructed by studying its daughter languages. The similarities among the daughter languages indicate that Common Slavic was spoken during recorded history, theories attempting to place Slavic origin in the Near East have been discarded. None of the proposed homelands reaches the Volga River in the east, over the Dinaric Alps in the southwest or the Balkan Mountains in the south, southern Ukraine is known to have been inhabited by Scythian and Sarmatian tribes before the Goths
10.
Khazars
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The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people, who created what for its duration was the most powerful polity to emerge from the break-up of the Western Turkic Kaganate. For some three centuries the Khazars dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea, the alliance was dropped around 900. Between 965 and 969, the Kievan Rus ruler Sviatoslav I of Kiev conquered the capital Atil, the native religion of the Khazars is thought to have been Tengrism, like that of the North Caucasian Huns and other Turkic peoples. The polyethnic populace of the Khazar Khaganate appears to have been a multiconfessional mosaic of pagan, Tengrist, Jewish, Christian and this theory still finds occasional support, but most scholars view it with scepticism. The theory is associated with antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Gyula Németh, following Zoltán Gombocz, derived Xazar from a hypothetical *Qasar reflecting a Turkic root qaz- being an hypothetical velar variant of Common Turkic kez-, louis Bazin derived it from Turkic qas- on the basis of its phonetic similarity to the Uyğur tribal name, Qasar. András Róna-Tas connects it with Kesar, the Pahlavi transcription of the Roman title Caesar, D. M. Dunlop tried to link the Chinese term for Khazars to one of the tribal names of the Uyğur Toquz Oğuz, namely the Gésà. One method for tracing their origins consists in analysis of the possible etymologies behind the ethnonym Khazar itself. The tribes that were to comprise the Khazar empire were not a union, but a congeries of steppe nomads and peoples who came to be subordinated. They appear to stem from Mongolia and South Siberia in the aftermath of the fall of the Hunnic/Xiōngnú nomadic polities, moving west, the confederation reached the land of the Akatziroi, who had been important allies of Byzantium in fighting off Attilas army. An embryonic state of Khazaria began to form sometime after 630, Göktürk armies had penetrated the Volga by 549, ejecting the Avars, who were then forced to flee to the sanctuary of the Hungarian plain. The Āshǐnà clan whose tribal name was Türk appear on the scene by 552, by 568, these Göktürks were probing for an alliance with Byzantium to attack Persia. Both briefly challenged Tang hegemony in eastern Turkestan, to the West, two new nomadic states arose in the meantime, Old Great Bulgaria under Kubrat, the Duōlù clan leader, and the Nǔshībì subconfederation, also consisting of five tribes. The Duōlù challenged the Avars in the Kuban River-Sea of Azov area while the Khazar Qağanate consolidated further westwards, led apparently by an Āshǐnà dynasty. The Qağanate of the Khazars thus took out of the ruins of this nomadic empire as it broke up under pressure from the Tang dynasty armies to the east sometime between 630–650. According to Omeljan Pritsak, the language of the Onoğur-Bulğar federation was to become the lingua franca of Khazaria as it developed into what Lev Gumilev called a steppe Atlantis, Khazaria developed a Dual kingship governance structure, typical among Turkic nomads, consisting of a shad/bäk and a qağan. The emergence of this system may be deeply entwined with the conversion to Judaism, particularly elaborate rituals accompanied a royal burial. At one period, travellers had to dismount, bow before the rulers tomb, such a royal burial ground is typical of inner Asian peoples
11.
Novgorod Republic
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Citizens referred to their city-state as His Majesty Lord Novgorod the Great, or more often as Lord Novgorod the Great. The Republic prospered as the easternmost port of the Hanseatic League, in the middle of the 9th century Novgorod was only a name used to describe a staging post on the trade route from the Baltic Sea to the Byzantine Empire. It was populated by various Finnic and Slavic tribes that were constantly at war with one another for supremacy. However, these tribes came together during the beginning of the 9th century to try, Novgorod functioned as the original capital of the Rus people until 882 when Oleg transferred his administration to Kiev. From that time until 1019-1020 Novgorod was a part of Kievan Rus, Novgorod Princes were appointed by the Grand Prince of Kiev. Novgorod was sort of a center as by legend it was the first city of Rus. Novgorod still possesses relics of the beliefs that preceded Christianity and are now part of their pre-Christian Pagan/Norse/Slavic history. Novgorod continuously played a key role in the politics of Rus by assisting Vladimir the Great of Kiev, one of his first actions as Grand Prince was to grant loyal Novgorodians numerous freedoms and privileges. Thus the foundation for the Novgorod Republic was laid, while still a part of Kievan Rus, Novgorod eventually evolved into a powerful regional center that was largely independent. The Novgorod boyars began to dominate the offices of posadnik and tysyatsky, in 1136, the Novgorodians dismissed Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich and over the next century and a half were able to invite in and dismiss a number of princes. However, these invitations or dismissals were often based on who the dominant prince in Rus or Appanage Russia was at the time, cities such as Staraya Russa, Staraya Ladoga, Torzhok, and Oreshek were part of the Novgorodian Land. According to some accounts, a vicar of the archbishop ran the city of Staraya Ladoga in the 13th century, the city of Pskov, initially part of the Novgorodian Land, had de facto independence from at least the 13th century after joining the Hanseatic League. Several princes such as Dovmont and Vsevolod Mstislavich reigned in Pskov without any deference to or consultation with the prince or other officials in Novgorod, pskovs independence was acknowledged by the Treaty of Bolotovo in 1348. Even after this, however, the Archbishop of Novgorod headed the church in Pskov and kept the title Archbishop of Novgorod the Great, in the 12th–15th century, the Novgorodian Republic expanded east and northeast. The Novgorodians explored the areas around Lake Onega, along the Northern Dvina, in the beginning of the 14th century the Novgorodians explored the Arctic Ocean, the Barents Sea, the Kara Sea, and the West-Siberian river Ob. The Ugric tribes that inhabited the Northern Urals had to pay tribute to Novgorod the Great, losing them meant economic and cultural decline for the city and its inhabitants. Indeed, the failure of the Novgorodians to win these wars led to the downfall of the Republic. Soviet-era Marxist scholarship frequently described the system of Novgorod as a feudal republic
12.
Tsardom of Russia
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From 1551 to 1700, Russia grew 35,000 km2 per year. After a military victory over Sweden and Poland, he implemented substantial reforms and proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721. While the oldest endonyms of the Grand Duchy of Moscow used in its documents were Rus and the Russian land, in the 1480s Russian state scribes Ivan Cherny and Mikhail Medovartsev mention Russia under the name Росиа, Medovartsev also mentions the sceptre of Russian lordship. In England of the 16th century, it was both as Russia and Muscovy. In Northern Europe and at the court of the Holy Roman Empire, however, muscovites refute this, saying that their country was originally called Russia. When they are asked what nation they are, they respond Russac, which means Russians, and when they are asked what place they are from, by the 16th century, the Russian ruler had emerged as a powerful, autocratic figure, a Tsar. By assuming that title, the sovereign of Moscow tried to emphasize that he was a ruler or emperor on par with the Byzantine emperor or the Mongol khan. At first, the Byzantine term autokrator expressed only the meaning of an independent ruler. Ivan IV was crowned Tsar and thus was recognized, at least by the Russian Orthodox Church and that concept was to resonate in the self-image of Russians in future centuries. The development of the Tsars autocratic powers reached a peak during the reign of Ivan IV, Ivan strengthened the position of the Tsar to an exceptional degree, demonstrating the risks of unrestrained power in the hands of a mentally unstable individual. Although apparently intelligent and energetic, Ivan suffered from breakdowns of paranoia and depression, Ivan IV became Grand Prince of Moscow in 1533 at the age of three. The Shuysky and Belsky factions of the boyars competed for control of the regency until Ivan assumed the throne in 1547, reflecting Moscows new imperial claims, Ivans coronation as Tsar was a ritual modeled after those of the Byzantine emperors. With the continuing assistance of a group of boyars, Ivan began his reign with a series of useful reforms, in the 1550s, he declared a new law code, revamped the military, and reorganized local government. These reforms undoubtedly were intended to strengthen the state in the face of continuous warfare, the key documents prepared by the so-called Select Council of advisors and promulgated during this period are as follows. Muscovy remained a fairly unknown society in Western Europe until Baron Sigismund von Herberstein published his Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii in 1549 and this provided a broad view of what had been a rarely visited and poorly reported state. In the 1630s, the Russian Tsardom was visited by Adam Olearius, whose lively, further information about Russia was circulated by English and Dutch merchants. One of them, Richard Chancellor, sailed to the White Sea in 1553, upon his return to England, the Muscovy Company was formed by himself, Sebastian Cabot, Sir Hugh Willoughby, and several London merchants. Ivan the Terrible used these merchants to exchange letters with Elizabeth I, despite the domestic turmoil of the 1530s and 1540s, Russia continued to wage wars and to expand
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