Thus the death of Vladimir was followed by multiple fratricide, three years of dynastic war, a further seven years of periodic armed conflict, then a decade of coexistence before the final resolution when just one ofVladimir's numerous sons - Iaroslav - was left alive and at liberty. We can (and scholars do) speculate as to how the succession in 1015 'should have' worked. For such speculations to have any value, we need to be reasonably confident of three things: (i) that we know the seniority of his sons; (ii) that we know Vladimir's own wishes; and (iii) that we know what in principle constituted dynastic propriety at the time. But we know none of these things. Even if we did, and even if we could thereby in theory extrapolate a system to which his sons were meant to adhere, their actions demonstrate that any notional system failed to function. For practical purposes no such system existed.
The next change of generations, on Iaroslav's death in 1054, was more orderly. Like Vladimir, Iaroslav allocated regional possessions to his sons. Unlike Vladimir - according to the Primary Chronicle - he specified a hierarchy of seniority both within the dynasty and between the regional allocations, and he laid down some principles of inter-princely relations. The chronicle presents Iaroslav's arrangements in the form of what purports to be his deathbed 'Testament' to his sons, though it is possible that the document itself was composed retrospectively.7
6 Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 183-207. The precise course of events is contentious: see e.g. I. N. Danilevskii, Drevniaia Rus' glazami sovremennikov i potomkov (IX-XIIvv.) (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 1998), pp. 336-54; A. V Nazarenko, Drevniaia Rus' na mezhdunarodnykhputiakh. Mezhdistsiplinarnye ocherki kul'turnykh, torgovykh, politicheskikh sviazei IX-XIIvekov (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul'tury, 2001), pp. 451-503.
7 Povest' vremennykh let (hereafter PVL), ed. D. S. Likhachev and V P. Adrianova-Peretts, 2 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1950), vol. I, p. 108. See Martin Dimnik, 'The "Testament" of Iaroslav "the Wise": A Re-Examination', Canadian Slavonic Papers 29 (1987): 369-86.
As at the death of Vladimir, the offspring of older sons who had pre-deceased their father were not part of the general share-out. Seniority was lateral before it was verticaclass="underline" that is, it passed down the line of sons before it passed to grandsons. However, whereas in 1015 Polotsk had remained with the family of Vladimir's deceased son, in 1054 Novgorod - the seat of Iaroslav's first son, who had died in 1052 - was not alienated as patrimony but reverted to being in the gift of the prince of Kiev. The oldest of Iaroslav's surviving sons in 1054 were given towns in the middle Dnieper region. Iziaslav and Sviatoslav were to have Kiev and Chernigov (still the two most desirable cities, as in the arrangement between Iaroslav and Mstislav thirty years before), while the third son, Vsevolod, was given the more precarious prize of Pereiaslavl', further south and more exposed to the steppes. As for the conduct of family business, the 'Testament' made two stipulations: first, the eldest son (Iziaslav) was to take the place of the father, was owed the same respect and had similar responsibility for resolving disputes; and second, the territorial allocations were to be inviolate, with no brother entitled to transgress the boundaries of another.
Iaroslav's 'Testament' dealt with an immediate problem of succession, but in the larger dynastic context over time it had to be more aspirational than operational. It only dealt explicitly with a small number of regions. It said nothing about subsequent succession. It was vague about the potential contradiction between its two principal instructions: that the oldest brother had a father's authority, yet that all the brothers' allocated possessions were inviolate (were Chernigov and Pereiaslavl' now the patrimonial possessions of Sviatoslav and Vsevolod respectively, or did Iziaslav have the right to reallocate as a father might?). And of course the 'Testament', like any document, could only be as effective as it was allowed to be by interested parties. Iaroslav's sons do seem to have operated as a reasonably harmonious triumvirate for nearly twenty years (briefly disrupted in 1067-8 when a kinsman from the Polotsk branch of the dynasty, Vseslav Briacheslavich, was installed as prince of Kiev by a faction of the townspeople). Yet in 1073 the two younger brothers, Sviatoslav and Vsevolod, blatantly contravened the provisions of their father's 'Testament' by ousting Iziaslav themselves. Iziaslav returned to Kiev after Svi- atoslav's death in 1076, only to be killed in 1078 in battle against a nephew, one of Sviatoslav's sons. Despite the dynastic messiness of Iziaslav's last few years, the result was neat. Kiev passed laterally down the line of brothers and Vsevolod at last found himself in a position similar to that of his father Iaroslav in the mid-i030s: with all his male siblings dead, he was left as 'sole ruler'. The 'Testament' of Iaroslav, blueprint for collective governance, was seemingly dissolved into monarchy. As we shall see, however, in the intervening period the dynasty had developed, and its complexities cannot be reduced to the struggle for Kiev alone.
The next change of generation, on Vsevolod's death in 1093, illustrated and affirmed an important feature of dynastic convention. Vsevolod was succeeded as prince of Kiev by Sviatopolk Iziaslavich. Seniority did not, therefore, pass directly from Vsevolod to his offspring, but reverted to the offspring of his older brother. Or rather, it reverted to the offspring of the oldest of his brothers who had been prince of Kiev (the general practice was that one could only succeed to a throne where one's father had already been prince - so those whose fathers died young were at risk of falling off the ladder of succession). Three principles thus emerge: (i) legitimacy in general resides with the dynasty as a whole; (ii) seniority passes laterally down the line of brothers, and then back up to the offspring of the senior brother, except that (iii) a prince of Kiev should be the son of a prince of Kiev (according to the chronicles' formula a prince 'sits on the throne of his father and grandfather').
Although this nuance might be seen as a useful device to limit the number of claimants, the excluded members of the dynasty did not disappear, nor did they cease to be princes, nor did they lose the broader claim to some legitimate share of the family inheritance. Squabbles over Kiev itself are only a small part of the larger pattern of dynastic rule: a pattern which became ever more complex as the family expanded. Regional allocations came to be regarded as patrimonial possessions, within which the senior regional princes could then allocate possessions to their own offspring, approximately reproducing at local level the conventions which emerged in the Kievan succession. Indeed, Kiev and Novgorod remained exceptional in that they always retained, in different ways, a pan-dynastic dimension, never quite being converted into patrimonial principalities. With the dynasty continually expanding, and with every son of a prince remaining a prince, and with no mechanism for limiting the overall numbers, so the regional controversies over succession multiplied. For over forty years from Vsevolod's accession in 1078 there were no serious disputes over the Kievan inheritance, but instead the prince of Kiev and his senior associates on the middle Dnieper had to devote more and more of their time to dealing with conflicts among their junior or dispossessed kinsmen. Regional rivalries among land-hungry princelings were a powerful stimulus for settlement and colonisation and hence gave rise to fresh problems of precedence and demarcation. If in 1015 the princes posted around the periphery had looked inwards to Kiev, by the 1090s there was fierce competition for rights of tribute-gathering or settlement in previously remote areas in the north-east (Rostov, Suzdal') and south-west (Vladimir-in-Volynia, Peremyshl', Terebovl'), which thereby became ever more closely drawn into the political, economic and cultural nexus. The dynastic conventions, messy as they can appear to be (a particularly grisly series of conflicts in the mid-i090s led to an attempt at regulation through an accord at Liubech in 1097),[34] nevertheless helped to drive the process by which the lands of the Rus' gradually expanded outwards from the original north-south axis between the Baltic and the steppes and were consolidated into an increasingly coherent politico-cultural zone.
34
Franklin and Shepard,