Jonathan Shepard

Simon Franklin

This eight-volume series, covering the history of Russia and its immediate neighbors from the emergence of Rus through to the present day, is written for students and non-specialist readers. A major strength of the series its the space it devotes to the less familiar histories of Rus and Russia before the time of Peter the Great. This eagerly awaited study--the first in modern times by western scholars, explores one of the definitive processes int eh making of modern Europe: the emergence, amongst the diverse inhabitants of the bast landmass east of the Carpathians, of the 'Land of the Rus' (Russia to medieval Latin writers), whose modern heirs include Ukraine and Belarus as well as Russia itself. In the eighth century, the region was sparsely inhabited by separate groups of Slavs, Balts, Finno-Ugrain and Turkic peoples, with few focuses of settlement or wealth, and little to link one group to another. By the late twelfth century, it bristled with prosperous towns, bonded in networks of trade and commerce, and ruled by members of a single dynasty. It communicated in a single dominant language (Slavonic) and professed a single dominant faith (Orthodox Christianity). How and why this transformation came about is the subject of this book. It starts with Scandinavian adventures traveling the northern forests in search of eastern silver. It shows how their successors opened the trade route south to Byzantium, and established themselves in Kiev, as their base for the hazardous journey across the steppes. It traces Kiev's rise to become, by the mid-eleventh century, a city of enviable wealth and self-confident Christian culture. And it shows how the ruling dynasty spread it operations north and west into new and increasingly prosperous regional centres, like Novgorod and Galich--and, most significantly for the history of Russia, into the heartlands of the future Muscovy. Within this framework, the authors explore every aspect of the world of the early Rus--social, economic, cultural and religious as well as political. In doing so they fill a vast blank in the mental maps of most of us. Better still, sifting the mass of post-Soviet historiography and using a wealth of evidence from archaeological and literary as well as archival sources, they are able to bring their unfamiliar subject vividly alive. Here are the laws and customs, the buildings and lifestyles, even the everyday letters about love and money (remarkably preserved on birch bark, and many only recently discovered) which illuminate this vanished world. The Emergence of Rus is a major contribution to Russian and Slavonic studies, and a masterly piece of historical synthesis.

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