Class 6: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (2)
and they're based on oral tradition.
So they're pretty good comparatively speaking
to historical sources.
And, oh, he also married one of his,
So Yaroslav also married one of his own daughters
to the king of Norway, right?
So we're very, here, connected
to the history of Scandinavia.
And it's inconceivable that he didn't speak
whatever we wanna call the Swedish language,
or whatever we wanna call it at that time.
He did marry another one of his daughters,
this is just something we have to know.
He did marry one of his other daughters
to the king of France, which is a fun fact,
which every Ukrainian needs for you to know.
So we're gonna make sure that it's in this class.
That would be Yaroslav's favorite daughter
who was called Ana, who was remembered as Anne of Kyiv.
Because from the point of view of Paris,
she was Anne of Kyiv.
She, in the middle of the 11th century,
she was the queen of France.
She was the one who went to Paris and said,
compared to Kyiv, this is kind of dingy and pathetic
and wanted to go back.
So now you know, that's Anne of Kyiv.
So Yaroslav is a Scandinavian prince,
but he is also an inheritor of Byzantine Christianity
from his father.
And he is also the ruler of a Slavic speaking population.
So it's like there's a triangle.
So on the Byzantine side of the triangle, he builds,
or maybe he completes the church of San Sophia,
which is the central cathedral in Kyiv,
which still exists.
It exists in a kind in a kind of Baroque reconstruction,
but which still exists and was completed
somewhere around the 1030s.
And it was modeled on Hagiya Sophia in Constantinople.
So the main cathedral in Kyiv was modeled on
the main cathedral in Constantinople.
So he's balancing that.
With that church came Greek speaking priests.
The first priests who came to convert the population
were from Constantinople.
They spoke Greek.
And with these Greek priests, and with the conversion
came a certain model of order,
which might seem intuitive to a lot of you.
It seems so natural, perhaps because
it's now more or less hegemonic,
but it had to arrive at a certain point,
which is the days of the week.
The days of the week and the idea that the day of rest
is the seventh day, Sunday.
Churches and churchyards come with Christianity.
The idea that you bury your dead, as I mentioned before,
rather than cremate comes with Christianity.
That you bury them in a certain place,
a cemetery in a churchyard, comes with Christianity.
So there's a civilizational package,
which comes with the Greek priests.
But interestingly, it is Yaroslav who shifts over
from Greek priests to local, Slavic speaking priests.
In the year 1051, he manages to have appointed,
or appoints himself, as the local head of the church,
the metropolitan, a man called Helarion,
who was a local Slav and not a Greek.
And somewhere around this time as well,
and this is crucial, the language of the liturgy
gets changed from Greek to old church Slavonic.
So in other words,
there's a big difference between going to church
and hearing a language that you can't understand at all,
to going to church and hearing a language
where you can understand a little bit, right?
So that's basically the shift from Greek
to old church Slavonic.
Greek, from the point of view of Kyiv,
is a foreign language.
Very few people speak Greek.
They're mostly people who have arrived from Constantinople
or Greek traders coming up and down
from the Black Sea coast, as we've talked about,
it's basically a foreign language.
And in the whole history of the Greek church,
the Orthodox church, the Eastern church in Kyiv,
relatively few people learn Greek.
Some people do, but relatively few.
Basically very educated churchmen learn Greek.
Old church Slavonic is a different story.
You'll remember where old church Slavonic came from.
Old church Slavonic is invented by Cyril and Methodius.
It has this journey down to Bulgaria,
and now it arrives in Kyiv.
And it has the huge advantage that it is a Slavic language.
It is based on a Slavic language,
probably the Slavic language that was spoken in Macedonia
by the mother of Cyril and Methodius.
But it's based in a Slavic language.
And therefore, if you're a native speaker
of a Slavic language, you can figure out a lot of it.
So when I studied old, I'm not a native speaker
of Slavic language, but I studied old church Slavonic.
A lot of it was intuitive to me, a thousand years later
and with the funny glycolytic alphabet,
but a lot of it was intuitive to me.
I could look at it and see a lot of it.
So it's not totally impenetrable and,
once you start with a Slavic language,
and this is very important,
you can then start to mess with it.
You can then take it as a basis of a written language.
And then with time, vernacular words will start
to make their way into the language.
What's the vernacular?
The vernacular is the language as we actually speak it.
As we actually speak it.
And so Slavic words, as people actually spoke them,
made their way into the written language,
thereby enriching it and changing it.
And this language, church Slavonic,
slowly becomes a written language,
which is serving not just the church,
but also the state.
And this is hugely important because,
if you're going to run a state as distinct from a church,
it's good to have law.
It's good to have a language in which
you can record that law.
So old church Slavonic, in the version that it's used
in the Kyivan state, is usually called Chancery Slavonic.
Just to make this distinction.
Chancery Slavonic.
And this Chancery Slavonic is recorded in,
is the language of a very important text,
which seems to originate with Yaroslav,
and then continues after his time for another century or so,
which is called the Ruska Pravda, or the Russkaya Pravda,
which is a collection of laws.
So there's secular law now.
There's secular law.
Not just church custom and church law, but secular law.
And what the law itself says is itself very revealing.
So now the law becomes a historical source for us.
We don't just have sagas,
we don't just have genealogies,
we don't just have, you know,
legends about Rus' written in Kyiv
a century after the events.
We have the law, which was applied in its own time.
What we see in this law are at least two
very important developments.
Number one, you see that the society has shifted
from the kind of society we talked about in the beginning,
which is one where people could be enslaved,
to one in which the chief preoccupation of people
was agriculture, and agriculture is being regulated.
So we now have a state which is based upon
people generating a surplus in agriculture.
The classic model, which we see over and over again,
beginning in Mesopotamia,
the classic model, where you can have a city,
and you can have a state with a capital in that city,
because you have rules about how you collect a surplus
from the people who are actually working the land.
Which may be a somewhat exploitative system,
but it's a very different system than raiding
and slave trading.
It's a very different system than raiding and slave trading.
And it describes a relationship between a ruler
and his people, as opposed to a relationship between
people who are just passing through and collecting things
or people that they're going to sell
somewhere further down the river.
So by the time the law is written down,
that transition has been achieved
and we're in a different kind of society.
Maybe even more fundamentally,
what you see in the Russkaya Pravda, the Ruska Pravda,
is an attempt to make a transition
from a culture of personal revenge,
to a culture where disputes are actually settled in courts.
So I'm sure all of you, you know, in your lives,
depending upon where you're from, have some familiarity,
at least from, I don't know, film,
with what I mean by personal revenge.
Where I do something to your clan
and therefore your clan has to do something to my clan,
and this can go on indefinitely, and it can be very costly
and destabilizing.
If you're trying to set up a state,
you don't want this clan and this clan
to have a feud indefinitely, right?
If there's a dispute, like this clan has stolen this,
or this clan has burned down that, or whatever,
you want that dispute to come to me,
you want the dispute to come to the court,
to the state, where it can be resolved.
And so one of the things that Ruska Pravda lays down
is what the appropriate penalties are.
So there's a generic penalty rather than personal feuds,
this is the kind of thing that builds up a state.
But, I keep coming back to this,
but a weakness in the state is that it didn't have
the legal structures to allow it to perpetuate itself,
which one finds surprisingly often is a problem with states.
It's actually, it's kind of the magic of founding a state
is how, the German sociologist Max Weber
was also obsessed with this,
how you get from the stage of founding a state
to the stage of continuing a state.
Where you might found a state because of some
great achievement or because of some charismatic leader,
but neither the achievement nor the charisma lasts.
And so then how do you keep the state actually going?
Maybe you found institutions,
these institutions sound pretty good,
but how do you make sure that people continue
to believe in them without the achievement
and the charisma somehow backing them up?
In then you event, how can you do it without a procedure?
So, in Kyiv, when we talk about Kyivan Rus,
we're talking about a range of lands, going to the east,
going to the north, going a bit to the south
and west of Kyiv.
We're talking about not just Kyiv and Ukraine today,
we're talking about what's now Belarus
and what's now a lot of European Russia.
All the way up to a bit to the east of what's now Moscow.
And these various districts were passed out
to the various sons in an extremely confusing order,
which honestly no one has figured out.
And one suspects it changed from generation to generation,
or sometimes that they were just making it up.
And if we don't know it, I think it's forgivable because
whatever the rules were, the brothers
were constantly fighting each other.
And if they were constantly fighting each other,
it means that whatever the rules were,
maybe they were contested, or not clear,
or maybe not taken always seriously.
So the rulers in Kyiv passed out the various districts
to their sons, and there was an idea that a certain son
at some point would become the ruler of Kyiv
and will be superior to all the others,
but that never panned out the way that
it was supposed to be.
So after Yaroslav's death in 1054,
we essentially have one long confusing
series of succession crises until the Mongols come in 1241.
There are however, at least one moment in here
which I want you to mark,
which is the rise of a city called Vladimir,
not the person, the city.
And we're gonna call it Vladimir and not Volodymyr
because this city is all the way out in
the far Eastern extreme of Rus',
a little bit to the east of where Moscow now is.
I say now, because Moscow didn't exist at the time.
Vladimir, the city, was ruled in the 1160s, 1170s
