Ante-Mongol Rus´, Seen from the Top

The clan-based, hierarchical, status-obsessed, conflict-ridden, and violence-prone nature of most medieval secular orders was such that chronicles, except when dealing with church matters and extraordinary natural phenomena, were almost exclusively interested in the tippy top of the ruling elite. This proceeded as if, in modern parlance, "politics" (who reigns where), "society" (elite births, deaths, marriages) and "sports" (challenges, skirmishes, standoffs, and wars) were all combined within one section of an annual newspaper. It is not, as any student of early Rus´ knows, that archaeology and numismatics have not provided rich data for economic history and plebeian life,¹ nor that one cannot reasonably assay a "city-state"-focused interpretation of early Rus´,² but that the only data-permissible, continuous history of known Rus´ people—with the possible exception of the shifting Novgorod top elite³—is that of the ruling (Riurikid/Volodimerichi) clan. The vicissitudes of this coterie, with chronicles as the key source, is the prime matter of the three volumes under review here. They are most welcome, since the scant pre-15th-century paper trail limits the quantity if not the quality of works about this period.⁴

We can envision these three works as completing two trilogies that intersect chronologically for about a century and topically, insofar as marriages and conflicts among descendants of Volodimer I are central for these historians.⁵ These books are also neatly complementary, for the details provided by Ties of Kinship, Raffensperger's non-monographic but meticulously documented handbook of the Rus´ princes' domestic and foreign marriages from the late 10th through the mid-12th century, fills in some gaps in Dimnik's fact-filled account of Rus´ princely competition and rule from the death of Iaroslav I to those of Iaroslav Vsevolodovich of (northern) Vladimir and Mikhail of Chernigov, as well as providing far more detail on such matters than Raffensperger's more analytical Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks could reasonably be expected to do.

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Perhaps seniority etiquette might dictate that we commence with Dimnik, but the logic of proceeding from sources to analytic narrative mandates otherwise. We should envision Ties of Kinship, for the period it covers, as the successor replacement of Nicolas de Baumgarten's 1927 classic scholarly reference work, "Généalogies et mariages occidentaux des Rurikides russes du X-e au XIII-e siècle."⁶ Following an introduction that discusses, inter alia, the sources used and (sometimes violated) consanguinity strictures of the Eastern and Western churches, Ties of Kinship divides into two parts. The first is a set of source-rich and informed mini-narratives of the marriages of six successive generations, numbered "One" to "Five" but starting with Volodimer I as "Prelude" and ending in a "Postscript" covering just the siblings' marriages of two Monomashich great-grandchildren to two children of Poland's Boieslaw III in the 1130s, but no other marriages from this generation. Accompanying all but 4 of the 59 marriages so discussed are illustrative diagrams, which also list the known domains so held of the princes and the corresponding dates of these holdings. The author is scrupulous in crediting others and indicating his sources so that the reader knows where questionable data are at stake—such as later chronicler-historians like Jan Długosz or Vasilii Tatishchev, who in a given case may have used a now lost source or may have embellished or made an educated guess.⁷

The second part of Ties of Kinship contains 22 genealogical tables: 14 Rus´-generated, 8 foreign—10 total, requiring two facing pages. These tables link, insofar as possible...