Kiev (Kyiv) Ukraine city Middle Ages history

Kiev (Kyiv) Ukraine city history articles

Legend has it that the name Kiev is derived from the name of Kii, one of three brothers who are said to have founded the town, but the origins of the name remain in dispute. The founding of Kiev city has been placed in the second half of the 5th century, and the Soviet government celebrated the Kiev city's 1,500th anniversary in May 1982.

Kiev city was evidently an early center of trade in such products as furs, wax and honey and is reputed to have attracted Scandinavian merchant-adventurers, known as Varangians, in the 9th century. Two Varangian chieftains, Askold and Dir, are said to have established themselves in Kiev city in 862, and a site identified as Askold's grave is marked by a rotunda on the bluffs overlooking the Dnepr river.

After a 20-year rule, Askold and Dir were dislodged by another Varangian leader, Oleg, who founded a dynasty that ruled Kiev city for three centuries. During this period Kiev emerged as the leader of a group of East Slavic principalities.

The coalition of principalities is known to historians as Kievan Rus, and Kiev itself was referred to by Nestor, its early chronicler, as the "mother of Russian cities". Under its principal rulers, the princes Vladimir (reigned about 978-1015), Yaroslav the Wise (reigned 1019-1054) and Vladimir II Monomakh (reigned 1113-1125), Kiev was one of the flourishing capitals of eastern Europe.

In the 12th century, Kiev city began to suffer a decline, which is attributed generally to dissension among the principalities of Kievan Rus, to attacks by successive waves of nomadic peoples driving through the steppe from the south, and to the emergence of new Russian power centers in the more sheltered northern forest.

Kiev city was leveled in 1240 by the Mongol forces of Batu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, as they swept west into Europe. The great early traveler Carpini, who visited Kiev city in 1246, reported that 200 houses were left in the commercial Podol district and that the people of Kiev had been enslaved by the Mongols. After a century of Mongol domination, Kiev city fell in the early 1360's to the expanding Lithuanian state, and continued to fend off raids from the steppe nomads. In 1482 it was once again razed, by the Tatars of the Crimea.

Gradually commercial life in the Podol district of Kiev city revived in the 16th century, and Poles replaced the Lithuanian overlords after the Polish-Lithuanian federation in the Union of Lublin (1569). A Ukrainian insurgency in the mid-17th century, abetted by the Russian czars, weakened the Polish hold, and in 1667, Kiev city passed to Russia under the Treaty of Andrusovo, together with the Ukraine east of the Dnepr River.