Professor of History Dr. C. Raffensperger in Introduction to his recently published book ‘Kingdom of Rus‘: “Examining a wide range of medieval sources, the facts expose the common practice in scholarship of referring to Rusian (with the single “s”) rulers as princes as a relic of early modern attempts to diminish the Rus‘. Not only was Rus part and parcel of medieval Europe, but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Rus was the largest kingdom in Christendom… Neither formulation, however, takes into account the historical realities of their respective geographical positions, for instance, the fact that Yaroslav [the Wise] ruled a kingdom that stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the Western Dvina river to the upper reaches of the Volga and lower Don rivers in the east, while Henry [Henry I of France] actively controlled the Île de France and little more even in the mid-eleventh century. This characterization is not meant to aggrandize Rus or diminish France, but simply to show the relative positions in the actual medieval world of the eleventh century and in the minds of modern scholars looking at the eleventh century…”
The “Gardariki, Ukraine” e-book takes a closer look at the possible roots of the Royal dynasty mentioned in the title.
Kyiv Rus’ borders around 1,000 AD >
