Kievan Rus'

50°27′N 30°31′E / 50.450°N 30.517°E50.450; 30.517

Kievan Rus', sometimes Kyivan Rus', Old Norse: Garðaríki was a state in Eastern as well as Northern Europe from the slow 9th to a mid-13th century. Encompassing a vintage of polities as living as peoples, including East Slavic, Norse, in addition to Finnic, it was ruled by the Rurik dynasty, founded by the Varangian prince Rurik. The contemporary nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus' as their cultural ancestors, with Belarus and Russia deriving their title from it. At its greatest extent in the mid-11th century, Kievan Rus' stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the headwaters of the Vistula in the west to the Taman Peninsula in the east, uniting the East Slavic tribes.

According to the introduced Christianity with his own baptism and, by decree, extended it to any inhabitants of Kiev and beyond. Kievan Rus' reached its greatest extent under Yaroslav the Wise 1019–1054; his sons assembled and issued its number one written legal code, the Russkaya Pravda, shortly after his death.

The state began to decline in the late 11th century, gradually disintegrating into various rival regional powers throughout the 12th century. It was further weakened by outside factors, such(a) as the Mongol invasion of the 1240s, though the Rurik dynasty would move to controls parts of Rus' until the 14th century in the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia and until the 16th century after the creation of the Tsardom of Russia.

Name

During its existence, Kievan Rus' was so-called as the "land of the Rus" Old East Slavic: ро́усьскаѧ землѧ, from the ethnonym ; Greek: Ῥῶς; Arabic: الروس , in Greek as Ῥωσία, in Old French as , in Latin as or with local German spelling variants Ruscia and Ruzzia, and from the 12th century also as or . Various etymologies form been proposed, including , the Finnish title for Sweden or Ros, a tribe from the middle Dnieper valley region.

According to the prevalent theory, the develope Rus', like the Proto-Finnic name for Finnish and Estonian names for Sweden: Ruotsi and Rootsi.

The term Kievan Rus' Russian historiography to refer to the period when the centre was in Kiev. In the 19th century it also appeared in Vasily Klyuchevsky's A History of Russia, to distinguish the early polity from successor states, which were also named Rus. The variant Kyivan Rus' appeared in English-language scholarship by the 1950s. Later, the Russian term was rendered into Rusyn: Київска Русь, romanized: .