The Ruling Families of Rus

This is a new history of the region known as Kyivan Rus', a state in eastern and northern Europe from the late ninth to the mid-sixteenth century that encompassed a variety of polities and peoples, including Lithuanian, Polish, Ottoman and others.

This account for the first time focuses on the history of the region via families, which allows the discussion of a wider region and a larger group of people than has been possible before. The book examines the development of Rus, Lithuania, Muscovy, and Tver, and their relations and interconnections with the Mongols, Byzantines, and many other peoples.

This readable yet thoroughly scholarly book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of eastern Europe, a region that is crucial in world politics today.

In the current context of the Russian-waged war in Ukraine, calls to decolonise the study of Eastern Europe and Eurasia abound. The search is on to shed the teleological framework that casts Russia's early modern and modern imperial ambitions into the medieval past and onto the lands that comprise today's Belarus and Ukraine. In The Ruling Families of Rus, Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski provocatively venture to displace some of the myths of Russia's aggrandisement that have been projected onto a medieval past that belongs to many others. The authors destabilise claims of a continuous Riurikid dynasty often used to link the Kyivan past with late medieval Muscovy, and instead focus on families, which opens historical space for women and the numerous kniazi who lived their lives unaware of the national historiographical claims that would come to define modern visions of the East European medieval period. Tracing the stories of families and individuals from the ninth to the late sixteenth century, this book evidences the entanglement of peoples across Europe and Eurasia and shows readers how diversity of intention is a mark of both the present and the past. Raffensperger and Ostrowski take a brave step in replacing the popularised Russian myth of the Middle Ages with a history that emphasises multiplicity and complexity of identities, relationships, and choices. - Olenka Z. Pevny, University of Cambridge