Yaroslav the Wise

• 1. Introduction

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  Yaroslav the Wise died on the 20th of February 1054, and yet the arguments about who he really was have never stopped. Was he the son of Rogneda of Polotsk, Vladimir the Great's conquered bride? Or was he the son of Anna Porphyrogenita, a Byzantine princess whose blood would explain everything that came after? His skeleton was opened in 1936, opened again in 1939, returned decades later in 1964 - or so the documents claimed. When the sarcophagus was unlocked again in 2009, it held only the bones of an unknown woman. The Grand Prince of Kiev had vanished. What remains is a reign that stretched from Rostov to Novgorod to Kiev, a dynasty that placed daughters on the thrones of France, Hungary, and possibly England, a legal code that gave the East Slavs their first written law, and a cathedral built to announce that Kiev was a civilization.

• 2. A Disputed Son

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  The Primary Chronicle, the main written record of early Rus', places Yaroslav among Vladimir the Great's many sons by Rogneda of Polotsk. But the examination of his skeleton in the 1930s suggested he was actually among Vladimir's youngest children, not his second-born as later tradition assumed. French historian Jean-Pierre Arrignon argued that Yaroslav was in fact the son of Anna Porphyrogenita, the Byzantine princess Vladimir had married after his divorce from Rogneda. Arrignon's reasoning: Yaroslav's military challenge to Constantinople in 1043 makes far more sense as a dynastic claim than as a simple raid. William Humphreys reached the same conclusion through the naming patterns Yaroslav used for his own children. His sons received Slavic names. His daughters received Greek names only. One of his daughters was named Anna. If the pattern holds, it points toward a mother from Greece, not Polotsk. Mykola Kostomarov had raised doubts about the Rogneda connection as far back as the 19th century. None of it has been settled. The Norse sagas, which called him Jarisleif the Lame, noted his limp as a legendary quality; the scientists who studied his remains confirmed a real and lasting injury, probably from an arrow wound.

• 3. The War for Kiev

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  Yaroslav was governing Novgorod in 1014 when he refused to send tribute south to Kiev. His father Vladimir had already announced his intention to pass the Kievan throne to his younger son Boris, and Yaroslav brought Varangian mercenaries over from Scandinavia in preparation for what seemed like an inevitable fight. Vladimir's death in July 1015 turned the dispute into a four-year civil war. Several brothers died in the fighting. Boris and Gleb were murdered. So was Svyatoslav. The Primary Chronicle blamed their half-brother Sviatopolk, and the Norse saga known as Eymundar þáttr hrings has been read as a description of Boris's assassination carried out by Varangians in Yaroslav's own service. The saga names the victim Burizaf, which also served as a Scandinavian name for Boleslaus I of Poland, Sviatopolk's father-in-law and military backer. Historians still disagree about which killing the saga actually describes. Yaroslav defeated Sviatopolk in their first direct battle in 1016. Sviatopolk returned in 1018 with Polish troops and briefly retook Kiev, pushing Yaroslav back north. By 1019, Yaroslav had secured the city for good. His first acts as Grand Prince included granting the Novgorodians who had backed him a package of freedoms and privileges. It was from those grants, at least in part, that the Novgorod Republic eventually emerged.

• 4. The Scandinavian Alignment

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  Yaroslav's marriage to Ingegerd Olofsdotter in 1019 was not a private arrangement. Her father, Olof Skötkonung of Sweden, had originally considered marrying her to Olaf II of Norway. Choosing Yaroslav instead was a diplomatic statement, and according to the Heimskringla it drew protests from Swedish nobles who wanted to reassert control over territories once ruled by Olof's father, Eric the Victorious. The Swedish alliance shaped how Kievan Rus' projected power for the rest of Yaroslav's reign. Around 1035, an expedition commanded by a Swedish leader named Ingvar the Far-Travelled set out eastward from Sweden, nominally to support Yaroslav against the Byzantines and the Pechenegs. The men under Ingvar reached Georgia. Georgian annals recorded the arrival of some three thousand Swedish warriors. A contingent of around seven hundred of them joined the Georgian king Bagrat IV at the Battle of Sasireti against a rebellious rival named Liparit IV. They lost that battle. Ingvar's fate is uncertain; Icelandic annals compiled by Sturla Thordarson suggest he likely died of disease around 1041. According to legend, only one of his ships returned to Sweden. Yaroslav also worked closer to home: in 1031 he took back the Cherven cities from the Poles and built the fort of Sutiejsk to hold them. Around 1034, he sealed an alliance with Polish King Casimir I the Restorer through the latter's marriage to Yaroslav's sister Maria.

• 5. Building a Capital

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  In 1036, Yaroslav won a decisive victory over the Pechenegs near Kiev. The nomadic Pechenegs never threatened Kiev again after that year. To mark the victory, Yaroslav sponsored the construction of Saint Sophia Cathedral in 1037. The choice of dedication was deliberate: the great cathedral of Constantinople was also called Hagia Sophia. Kiev's rulers were making a statement about where their city stood in the world. That same year, the monasteries of Saint George and Saint Irene were added, named for the patron saints of Yaroslav and his wife respectively. The Golden Gate of Kiev, another celebrated monument of his reign, was destroyed during the Mongol invasion of Rus' and later restored. In 1051, Yaroslav pushed further against Byzantine religious authority by having a Slavic monk, Hilarion of Kiev, proclaimed the metropolitan bishop of Kiev. This directly challenged the Byzantine practice of placing Greeks in senior ecclesiastical posts in Rus'. Hilarion's own writing, a discourse addressing both Yaroslav and his father Vladimir, is cited as the first surviving work of Old East Slavic literature. Yaroslav had already established the earliest written code of law for East Slavic lands, the Russkaya Pravda, probably during the period following his victory over Sviatopolk. Taken together - the cathedral, the laws, the appointment of a native metropolitan, the promotion of Slavic writing - his reign reads less as a series of military campaigns and more as a sustained effort to build institutions.

• 6. The Dynastic Web

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  Saint Sophia's Cathedral in Kiev houses a fresco of Yaroslav's family: himself, his wife Ingegerd (known in Rus' as Irene), their four daughters, and their six sons. Three of his daughters married foreign princes who had been living in exile at his court. Elisiv of Kiev married Harald Hardrada, who had earned her hand through military service in the Byzantine Empire. Anastasia of Kiev married the future Andrew I of Hungary. Anne of Kiev married Henry I of France and later served as regent of France during their son's minority; she was described as Yaroslav's most beloved daughter. A possible fourth daughter, Agatha, may have married Edward the Exile of England; if so, she was the mother of Edgar the Aetheling and Saint Margaret of Scotland. Yaroslav also worked to shape succession within Rus' itself. His eldest son Vladimir ruled Novgorod from 1034 and built the Cathedral of St. Sophia there, but predeceased his father. Three other sons - Iziaslav I, Sviatoslav II, and Vsevolod I - each reigned in Kiev in succession after Yaroslav's death. His younger brother Sudislav spent his life imprisoned by Yaroslav's order, a detail that sits uncomfortably alongside Nestor the Chronicler's portrait of Yaroslav as a model ruler. Yaroslav gave Ladoga to his wife Ingegerd as a marriage gift, a gesture that says something about the scale of the resources a Kievan grand prince commanded.

• 7. The Missing Remains

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  Yaroslav's body was placed in a white marble sarcophagus inside Saint Sophia's Cathedral after his death in 1054. When Soviet researchers opened it in 1936, they found the bones of two people: one male, identified as Yaroslav, and one female whose identity was never established. The female may have been his wife Ingegerd. The sarcophagus was opened a second time in 1939 and the remains were taken out for further study. Documents later stated that the bones were returned in 1964. When the sarcophagus was opened again in 2009, it contained only a single skeleton - a female. Yaroslav was gone. Investigation suggested the 1964 reinterment documents had been falsified. People who had been involved in the earlier research pointed toward the same explanation: Yaroslav's remains were deliberately hidden before the German occupation of Ukraine during the Second World War, to protect them from damage. After the war, it appears they were either lost entirely or moved to the United States, where many religious artifacts had been sent to keep them from what was described as communist mistreatment. The question of where Yaroslav the Wise actually rests has not been answered.

• 8. A Name Across Four Countries

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  Four towns in four countries carry Yaroslav's name, and three of them he founded himself: Yaroslavl on the Volga River in present-day Russia; Jaroslaw in Poland; Yuryev, now known as Bila Tserkva in Ukraine; and a second Yuryev built on the site of the captured Estonian town of Tarbatu, which he renamed after his patron saint and which became what is now Tartu. The pointed metal helmet worn by Russian soldiers during the Crimean War was called the Helmet of Yaroslav the Wise. It was the first pointed helmet adopted by a modern army - before the German military made that style famous. In 2008, viewers of the Ukrainian television program Velyki Ukraintsi voted Yaroslav first among their greatest compatriots, giving him forty percent of the votes. One producer of the program later claimed the result had been manipulated and that Stepan Bandera would have placed first otherwise. In 2003, a monument to Yaroslav was erected in Kyiv, made by Boris Krylov and Oles Sydoruk. A second monument, by sculptor Sergey Gaev, was unveiled on the 12th of December 2022 near the Novgorod Technical School. The Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv still bears his name, a reminder that the Russkaya Pravda he promulgated in the early 11th century was the beginning of a legal tradition that outlasted his dynasty by centuries.