Varangian rowers gave their name to the first East Slavic state
Kievan Rus’ knitted East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic societies into Eastern Europe’s first major East Slavic polity from the late ninth to mid-thirteenth centuries under Rurikid princes. The Primary Chronicle credits Varangian Oleg (r. 879–912) with pushing south from Novgorod along the Dnieper to guard trade from Khazar pressure.
Kievan Rus' is a label coined by nineteenth-century Russian historians for the period when Kiev led the East Slavic world. People at the time spoke of the land of Rus'. The most widely accepted derivation traces Rus' to an Old Norse word for men who row, since rowing was how travellers moved along Eastern Europe's rivers; the same root gives Finnish Ruotsi and Estonian Rootsi for Sweden and may connect to the Swedish coast of Roslagen. Other suggestions point to a Ros tribe on the middle Dnieper.
According to the Primary Chronicle, the Varangian prince Oleg the Wise, who ruled from 879 to 912, first gathered the East Slavic lands, extending his reach down the Dnieper valley from Novgorod to shield commerce from the Khazars and taking Kiev. At first the name Rus' attached to the Varangians and their core around Kiev, Chernigov and Pereyaslavl; later rulers applied it to everything they controlled, and both the narrow and broad senses persisted until the Mongols came.
Sviatoslav I made the first big conquests, warring on the Khazars. Vladimir the Great was baptised and ordered Christianity on Kiev's population and beyond. Under Yaroslav the Wise, from 1019 to 1054, the realm reached its widest, from the White Sea to the Black Sea and from the Carpathians to the Taman Peninsula, and shortly after his death his sons issued the first written law code, the Russkaya Pravda. The state mixed East Slavic, Norse and Finnic peoples under the Rurikid dynasty.
Decline began in the late eleventh century as the state broke into rival principalities through the twelfth. The weakening of Byzantium, its main trading partner, and the shrinking of the river routes hurt further, and the Mongol invasion finished it in the mid-thirteenth century. Rurikids still ruled in Russia until Feodor I died in 1598. Three modern nations, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, each treat it as an ancestor of their culture, and two of them take their names from it.
Source: Kievan Rus'
