In 988 the introduction of Christianity to Kiev enhanced its significance as the spiritual centre of Rus. By the 12th century, according to the chronicles, the city's wealth and religious importance was attested to by its more than 400 churches. The Cathedral of St. Sophia, parts of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra (Monastery of the Caves), and the ruins of the Golden Gate remain today as witnesses to Kiev at the height of its splendour. The town was famed for its art, the mosaics and frescoes of its churches, its craftsmanship in silver, and the quality of many of its manufactures. One of Europe's major cities, Kiev established diplomatic relations with Byzantium, England, France, Sweden, and other countries. Travelers wrote of its population as numbering tens of thousands.
Throughout the period of Kievan Rus, however, the city was engaged in a succession of wars against the nomadic warrior peoples who inhabited the steppes to the south, in turn the Khazars (Khazar), Pechenegs, and Polovtsy (Kipchaks (Kipchak)). These conflicts weakened the city, but even greater harm was done by the endless, complex internecine struggles of the princedoms into which Rus was divided. In 1169 Prince Andrew Bogolyubsky (Andrew I) of Rostov-Suzdal captured and sacked Kiev. Thus by the late 12th century the power of the city had declined, and in the following century it was unable to resist the rising and formidable power of the Mongols (Golden Horde). In 1238 a Mongol army under Batu, grandson of Genghis Khan, invaded Rus and, having sacked the towns of central Rus, in 1240 besieged and stormed Kiev. Much of the city was destroyed and most of its population killed. The Franciscan friar and traveler Giovanni Da Pian Del Carpini six years later reported only 200 houses surviving in Kiev.
Kiev under Lithuania and Poland
In the 14th century what was left of Kiev and its surrounding area came under the control of the powerful and expanding grand duchy of Lithuania (Lithuania, grand duchy of), which captured it in 1362. For a long time thereafter Kiev had little function except as a fortress and minor market on the vaguely defined frontier between Lithuania and the steppe Tatars (Tatar), based in the Crimea. It frequently came under attack from the Tatars; in 1482 the Crimean khan, Mengli Giray, took and sacked the town. Almost the only survival of Kiev's former greatness was its role as the seat of an Orthodox metropolitan. A step forward came in 1516, when the grand duke Sigismund I granted Kiev a charter of autonomy, thereby much stimulating trade.
In 1569 the Union of Lublin (Lublin, Union of) between Lithuania and Poland gave Kiev and the Ukrainian lands to Poland. Kiev became one of the centres of Orthodox (Eastern Orthodoxy) opposition to the expansion of Polish Roman Catholic influence, spearheaded by vigorous proselytization by the Jesuits. In the 17th century a religious Ukrainian brotherhood was established in Kiev, as in other Ukrainian towns, to further this opposition and encourage Ukrainian nationalism. Peter Mogila (Mogila, Peter) (Petro Mohyla), a major theologian and metropolitan of Kiev from 1633 to 1646, founded there the Collegium (later the Academy of Kiev), which became a major focus of the struggle with Roman Catholicism.
In the 17th century there was also increasing unrest among the Zaporozhian Cossacks of the Dnieper downstream of Kiev and an ever-growing struggle between them and the Polish crown. This eventually culminated in the revolt of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (Khmelnytsky, Bohdan), who, assisted by the Crimean Tatars, entered Kiev with his insurgent Cossacks in 1648. He came under heavy pressure from the Polish forces, and in 1654 Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks signed the Pereyaslav Agreement, in essence submitting Ukraine to Moscow (Moscow, Grand Principality of); this was followed by a prolonged and confused period of strife and destruction leading in 1667 to the Treaty of Andrusovo (Andrusovo, Truce of), by which Kiev and the Dnieper left-bank part of Ukraine became an autonomous Cossack state under the suzerainty and protection of Moscow. Thereafter further struggle ensued against the Turks, with the Cossacks constantly changing sides and engaging in internecine disputes. In 1686 Kiev was finally yielded to Muscovy by Poland and stood as the sole Muscovite outpost on the right bank of the Dnieper.
Trypillya culture
▪ anthropology
also called Cucuteni-Trypillya, Trypillya also spelled Trypillia, or Tripillya, Russian Tripolye
Neolithic European culture that arose in Ukraine between the Seret and Bug rivers, with extensions south into modern-day Romania and Moldova and east to the Dnieper River, in the 5th millennium BC. The culture's characteristic pottery was red or orange and was decorated with curvilinear designs painted or grooved on the surface. Its makers occupied villages of long, rectangular houses that were sometimes arranged in concentric circles. In the centre, cattle were fenced in an enclosure. The Trypillya people practiced shifting agriculture, frequently moving their settlements.
Slav
▪ people
member of the most numerous ethnic and linguistic body of peoples in Europe, residing chiefly in eastern and southeastern Europe but extending also across northern Asia to the Pacific Ocean. Slavic languages belong to the Indo-European family. Customarily Slavs are subdivided into east Slavs (chiefly Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), west Slavs (chiefly Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Wends, or Sorbs), and south Slavs (chiefly Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Macedonians). Bulgarians, though of mixed origin like the Hungarians, speak a Slavic language and are often designated as south Slavs. (See Bulgar.)
In religion, the Slavs traditionally divided into two main groups: those associated with the Eastern Orthodox church (Russians, most Ukrainians, some Belarusians, Serbs, and Macedonians) and those associated with the Roman Catholic church (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes, some Ukrainians, and most Belarusians). The division is further marked by the use of the Cyrillic alphabet by the former (but including all Ukrainians and Belarusians) and the Latin alphabet by the latter. There are also many minority religious groups, such as Muslims, Protestants, and Jews; and in recent times Communist governments' official encouragement of atheism, together with a general trend toward secularism, has eroded membership in the traditional faiths.
Prehistorically, the original habitat of the Slavs was Asia, from which they migrated in the 3rd or 2nd millennium BC to populate parts of eastern Europe. Subsequently, these European lands of the Slavs were crossed or settled by many peoples forced by economic conditions to migrate. In the middle of the 1st millennium BC, Celtic tribes settled along the upper Oder River, and Germanic tribes settled on the lower Vistula and lower Oder rivers, usually without displacing the Slavs there. Finally, the movement westward of the Germans in the 5th and 6th centuries AD started the great migration of the Slavs, who proceeded in the Germans' wake westward into the country between the Oder and the Elbe-Saale line, southward into Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and the Balkans, and northward along the upper Dnieper River. When the migratory movements had ended, there appeared among the Slavs the first rudiments of state organizations, each headed by a prince with a treasury and defense force, and the beginning of class differentiation.
In the centuries that followed, there developed scarcely any unity among the various Slavic peoples. The cultural and political life of the west Slavs was integrated into the general European pattern. They were influenced largely by philosophical, political, and economic changes in the West, such as feudalism, Humanism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French and Industrial revolutions. As their lands were invaded by Mongols and Turks, however, the Russians and Balkan Slavs remained for centuries without any close contact with the European community; they evolved a system of bureaucratic autocracy and militarism that tended to retard the development of urban middle classes and to prolong the conditions of serfdom. The state's supremacy over the individual tended to become more firmly rooted.