Reign of Yaroslav the Wise in Kyiv

Yaroslav took Kyiv for good after the battle on the Alta in 1019, the year he married Ingegerd (Irina), daughter of King Olof Skötkonung of Sweden. His brother Mstislav of Tmutarakan challenged him: in 1024, in a night battle during a thunderstorm at Listven near Chernihiv, Mstislav’s retinue cut down Yaroslav’s Varangians, and in 1026 the brothers made peace at Gorodets and divided the Rus’ land along the Dnieper — the left bank with Chernihiv to Mstislav, the right bank with Kyiv to Yaroslav. Together they retook the Cherven towns from Poland in 1031. When Mstislav died, in 1036 according to the chronicle, Yaroslav ‘became sole ruler in the Rus’ land’, though Polotsk remained with his nephew Bryachislav. That year the Pechenegs besieged Kyiv; Yaroslav came from Novgorod with Varangians and Slovenes, placed the Varangians in the centre, the Kyivans on the right and the Novgorodians on the left, and after a hard fight on the field outside the walls where St Sophia now stands scattered the nomads, many of whom drowned in the Setoml. The Pechenegs never threatened Kyiv again, and their horde moved off towards the Danube.

In 1037 Yaroslav laid out the ‘great city’ with the Golden Gate and founded St Sophia, the metropolitan cathedral, together with the monasteries of St George and St Irene. The chronicle praises him as a lover of books who gathered many scribes to translate from Greek into Slavonic, and in 1051 he had a council of bishops install the Rus’-born Hilarion as metropolitan. His campaigns reached the Chud — where in 1030 he founded Yuryev, today’s Tartu — and the Yatvingians, Lithuanians and Mazovians, but in 1043 the fleet he sent against Constantinople under his son Vladimir was wrecked by a storm, and peace with Byzantium was restored only three years later.

Yaroslav’s family ties spanned Europe: his daughters married two future kings — Harald Hardrada of Norway, who had served him in Rus’ before rising in Byzantium, and Andrew I of Hungary — and King Henry I of France, and his sister married Casimir I of Poland. His name is attached to the oldest part of the Russkaya Pravda. Before his death he divided the towns among his sons — Kyiv to Iziaslav, Chernihiv to Sviatoslav, Pereiaslav to Vsevolod, lesser towns to the younger ones — and bade them obey the eldest and live in love. He died at Vyshgorod on 20 February 1054, the date given by the chronicle and by a graffito in St Sophia — though the chronicle’s ‘Saturday of the first week of Lent’ fell on the 19th that year, and both dates are discussed — and was buried in a marble sarcophagus in St Sophia.