Ask undergraduate students what the Middle Ages means to them, and you will likely get answers that include the words “king” or “dynasty.” The popular parlance of the medieval world, spurred on by the cultural diffusion of the Crusader Kings games or Game of Thrones franchisein recent years, has privileged an understanding of the past grounded in concepts of “dynasties” or “great houses” as major principles of political organization. However, much like the nebulous idea of “feudalism,” medieval realities resist such clear-cut demarcations. As Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski put it, if we were to ask the children of a medieval ruler their thoughts on the matter, they would probably “not know that they were part of a dynasty. They did, however, know that they were part of a family” (50).
It is precisely this line of reasoning that Raffensperger and Ostrowski present in The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom. In doing so, they seek to separate the study of the medieval polity of Rus’ from the seemingly unshakeable concept of the “Riurikid dynasty.” This teleological framework, stretching from the semi-legendary Viking warlord Riurik in the ninth century to the last Muscovite ruler Feodor Ivanovich in 1598, has provided a convenient, if deceptively linear, path from Kyiv to Moscow. Most recently, this tenuous connection was espoused by Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, when he declared that a crucial medieval source, the Primary Chronicle (or Povest’ vremennykh let, “The Tale of Years Gone By” as its opening lines call it), avowed that Kyiv was the “mother of all Russian cities” as a pretext to his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The text actually claims that Kyiv is the “mother of all Rus’ian cities [emphasis added],” but Putin’s insistence on mistranslation shows how the long reach of the Riurik narrative still holds political consequences today. [1]
In The Ruling Families of Rus, Raffensperger and Ostrowski assert that the notion of the “Riurikids” is an historiographical anachronism, a sixteenth-century Muscovite invention designed to legitimize a singular, providential claim to power. As they rightly argue, there is no evidence that rulers like Iaroslav the Wise or Alexander Nevsky considered themselves a “Riurikid.” Rather, they would have viewed themselves as the son of Volodimer Sviatoslavich or Iaroslav Vsevolodovich, or the brother of Boris Volodimerovich or Andrei Iaroslavich. The primary locus, then, of identity and legitimacy for the rulers of Rus’ was not a mythical, long-dead progenitor, but immediate family and the broader kin-group, or clan. Within this larger clan, the authors argue, the operative political units were individual “families,” complex webs of relationships defined not just by patrilineal descent but also by the crucial, and often overlooked, roles of wives, mothers, and daughters.
The introduction and first two chapters provide a framework for the kingdom of Rus’ and sketch out some of the larger methodological problems with studying this medieval entity. Each of the following ten chapters takes as its subject one family group within the descendants of Volodimer Sviatoslavich, a larger descent tree that Raffensperger and Ostrowski term the Volodimerovichi. Within each chapter one finds a breakdown of the familial and marital relationships of a pivotal ruling couple and their children and the impact of these dynamics on certain regions of the kingdom of Rus’. Eschewing a more traditional approach to Rus’ian history that focuses on the northeastern portions of the kingdom, Raffensperger and Ostrowski pay special attention to the various cities that made up the Rus’ian polity and its borderlands, including Galicia-Volhynia, Vladimir-Suzdal, Tver, Moscow, Lithuania, and, after the thirteenth-century, Qaraqorum and Sarai. Perhaps most importantly, wives, mothers and daughters are presented not as mere conduits for dynastic alliance, but rather active political agents whose marriages, regencies, and diplomatic initiatives shaped the fortunes of their families and cities. As the authors put it, to leave these women out of the story “overlooks half of our evidence” (10).
As part of this revision to the narrative of the Riurikid dynasty, Raffensperger and Ostrowski tackle the larger issue of the kinds of sources that are available to us about medieval Rus’. From the onset, much less material survives from Rus’ than from comparable medieval spaces. Simon Franklin has noted that only 23 parchment documents survive from Rus’ in the eleventh century, 83 from the twelfth, and 191 from the thirteenth, compared to thousands from contemporary England or the German empire. [2] Most of the information presented in this book comes from the convoluted Rus’ian chronicle traditions. Take, for an example, the aforementioned Primary Chronicle. It is a text describing events in the ninth and tenth centuries supposedly compiled and rewritten by several different monks over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but its earliest surviving copy comes down in the Laurentian Codex (St. Petersburg, Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, MS F.p.IV.2), a manuscript compiled at the end of the fourteenth century. Its complicated transmission history means that we must be careful when using it as any sort of straightforward account of historical experience. Many other chronicles used in this book, like the First Novgorod Chronicle, the Kyivan Chronicle, and the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, have similar reliability issues. The authors embrace this reality of our source materials and readily acknowledge when there are things that we simply cannot know for certain. They also acknowledge that the chroniclers themselves were often monks in monasteries under the auspices of the Byzantine ecclesiastical establishment (67), bringing with them a set of expectations and ways of seeing the world that undoubtedly influenced their narratives.
The Ruling Families of Rus is thus a book pulled in many directions. It is, ostensibly, a political history of the kingdom of Rus’ from the perspective of some of its most elite participants: the ruling families themselves; and the monks and bishops whose engagement with writing technologies communicated their stories. Thus, one finds accounts of marriages, civil wars, and inheritance feuds, but not much on how these developments affected Rus’ians on the ground, even when our sources do hint at this information. For instance, the sack of Kyiv in 1169 is mentioned (91), but no attention given to the immense human suffering reported in the Kyivan Chronicle’s account of the event, including infants weeping as their mothers were dragged away into slavery. [3] While it is an elite history, it does give a human dimension to those at the top of society. The account of the wedding of Verkhuslava Vsevolodovna, where her parents weep as their eight-year-old daughter departs from their home, is a poignant reminder of the personal realities behind the political machinations of dynastic marriage (103). This book also challenges methodological conventions in Slavic studies and medieval studies more broadly, taking to task not only the notion of the Riurikids, but dynasties as an historically appropriate metric. At the same time, it is a meditation on history-writing itself--inviting scholars to think about how the narratives created in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries continue to steer scholarship today. The multiplicity of historiographies that the book interrogates makes what Raffensperger and Ostrowski have pulled off all the more impressive.
Yet, in speaking about so much, it is sometimes hard to determine who the book is speaking to: I was often left wondering who the audience of The Ruling Families of Rus is. The first several chapters scaffold out a rough outline of Rus’ian history and some overarching historiographical themes, as though written for a more general or undergraduate audience. But points of later chapters read as though they have specialists in mind, such as “a little lesson in Rus church politics” (192) that takes up a chunk of Chapter 10. In some places, the authors render the Slavonic word kniaz as “king” (73), a translation choice that Raffensperger has argued for elsewhere; but in other places leave it untranslated (133), indicating an expectation that readers will know what it represents. [4] At times, it seems to be speaking to larger questions in the historiography of more western parts of medieval Europe; at others, it assumes the reader is familiar with trends in Ukrainian, Imperial Russian, and Soviet historical writing, such as the work of Mikhailo Hrushevs’kyi or V. O. Kliuchevskii.
These quibbles aside, The Ruling Families of Rus’ is still an important book. As someone who personally struggled through an undergraduate survey course trying to make sense of the extensive and overlapping family connections of Rus’ian rulers in Nicholas Riasonovsky’s A History of Russia, such a new, and dynamic, political history of the Rus’ian polity is a welcome addition. However,Raffensperger and Ostrowski have not just written a new textbook about Rus’; they have challenged us to rethink the terms of our discussions. By dismantling the anachronistic “Riurikid dynasty” and replacing it with the more historically accurate concepts of families and clans, they have opened up new avenues for understanding this historical period--and its connections to the arc of medieval Eurasia. The Ruling Families of Rus’ successfully demonstrates that there is, indeed, “nothing inevitable about history” (12), and in doing so, makes the story of Rus’ richer, more complex, and infinitely more interesting.
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Notes:
1. Povest’ vremennykh let § 882 (6390), ed. D. S. Likhachev and V. P. Adrianova-Peretts, 2 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1950), 1: 20. “se budi mati gradom” rus’skim”.”
2. Simon Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950-1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23.
3. Kyivan Chronicle § 1171 [1169] (6679), Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei,43 vols. to date (St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, and Moscow: Arkheograficheskaia komissiia, Akademiia nauk, 1849-present), 2: col. 545.
4. See, for instance, Christian Raffensperger, The Kingdom of Rus’ (Kalamazoo, MI: Arc Humanities Press, 2017), 43-52.