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Updated: May 24, 2025
His sons married Greek, German, and English princesses; his sister became queen of Poland; his three daughters were queens of Norway, Hungary, and France. Scandinavian in origin, the dynasty of Rurik was reaching out hands of brotherhood towards its kinsmen in the West. But it is as a law-maker that Yaroslaf is chiefly known. Before his time the empire had no fixed code of laws.
It is a gloomy period, of three hundred years, upon which we now must enter, while violence, crime, and consequently misery, desolated the land. It is worthy of record that Nestor attributes the woes which ensued, to the general forgetfulness of God, and the impiety which commenced the reign immediately after the death of Yaroslaf. "God is just," writes the historian.
Perceiving that his dying hour was at hand, he sent for his two sons, Vlademer and Rostislaf, and the sorrowing old man breathed his last in their arms. Vsevolod was the favorite son of Yaroslaf the Great, and his father, with his dying breath, had expressed the wish that Vsevolod, when death should come to him, might be placed in the tomb by his side.
Nothing could have been more repugnant or foreign to the free Slav barbarian than the penal code which was modeled by Yaroslaf upon the one at Byzantium. Corporal punishment was unknown to the Slav, and was abhorrent to his instincts. This seems a strange statement to make regarding the land of the knout! But it is true.
They have deposed Yaroslaf, merely because he was faithful in collecting tribute for you." By such a crisis, republicanism was necessarily introduced in Novgorod. The people, destitute of a prince, and threatened by an approaching army, made vigorous efforts for resistance.
Vassali, a younger brother of Yaroslaf, now ascended the throne, establishing himself at Vladimir. The grand duchy of Lithuania, extending over a region of sixty thousand square miles, was situated just north of Poland. The Tartars, dissatisfied with the Lithuanians, prepared an expedition against them, and marching with a great army, compelled many of the Russian princes to follow their banners.
His son Yaroslaf, whom he had made ruler of Novgorod, had refused to pay tribute, and the old prince, forced to march against his rebel son, died of grief on the way. With all his faults, Vladimir deserved the title of Great which his country has given him.
Retiring, in a panic, to the remote northern province of Yaroslaf, he encamped, with a small force, upon one of the tributaries of the Mologa, and sent earnest entreaties to numerous princes to hasten, with all the forces they could raise, and join his army. The Tartars from Moscow marched north-west some one hundred and fifty miles to the imperial city of Vladimir.
Yaroslaf was the fifth able ruler of the dynasty of Rurik. The story of his young life resembles that of his father. He found his brother strong and threatening, and designed to fly from Novgorod and join the Varangians as a viking lord, as his father had done before him.
Yaroslaf, who had been entrusted with the feudal government of Novgorod, being informed of the death of his father, of the usurpation of Sviatopolk and of the assassination of three of his brothers, raised an army of forty thousand men and marched upon Kief. Sviatopolk, informed of his approach, hastened, with all his troops to meet him.
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