Category History & Events

From the limited Slavian records available, we can understand that the economic basis of Kievan Rus was trade in the initial times. The resources of the region included furs, beeswax, honey, and enslaved people. The three trade routes that were taken over by the Rus consisted of important trade lines between north and south, bridging Scandinavia and Constantinople and the east and the west from the Balkans to Greece.

Archaeologists have found more than 1,000 tablets made from birch bark from Kievan Rus cities, mainly from Novgorod. These writings, written in Old Eastern Slavic, are mainly associated with commercial themes such as accounting, credit and investments, all indicating their flourishing trade systems.

The currency of Kievan Rus was named the grivna, and in 15th-century Novgorod, 15 grivnas made up one ruble, equal to 170.1 grams of silver. A developed system of commercial credit and money lending made their line of credit open to anyone. In Kievan Rus, commercial loans were available to Rus, foreign merchants and investors as well.

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Feudalism was the structure of the Mediaeval Rus. By the latter half of the eleventh century, or even before, all the principalities in Kievan Rus were headed by a Rurik dynastic prince who resided in a castle situated in the capital city. All princes had a group of warriors known as druzhina. They guarded the forts at the frontier and protected the prince’s interests. The most important ones of the druzhina were the boyars, who were land-owners. Some of the boyars even had their own castles!

Each boyar had stewards (tivun) to take care of the land, different categories of semi-free peasants, and a few categories of enslaved people working in households and estates, who were originally military captives. Such captives were forced to work in agricultural land and as artisans and merchants, but whether or not they were considered to be enslaved is a topic of debate among scholars. It is said that their status evolved over time.

In terms of religion, monasteries were established by the Byzantine church in most of the principalities, with the head known as the Metropolitan based in Kyiv. Sheriffs (virnik) and mayors (posadnik) were given the duty of collecting various fines, tributes, and other fees for the city treasury.

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The Slavs are one of Europe’s largest ethnic groups, though there is not much information about their origins.

Now most scholars believe that they came from somewhere in western Central Asia, near the shores of the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. The largest of these groups are the Eastern Slavs, who are the ancestors of today’s Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. They arrived in modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia sometime during the middle of the first millennium AD.

This was around the same period during which many other previously Central Asian groups were moving to the west as a result of the Great Migration, which made many nomadic groups move from Central Asia into Europe and the Middle East from 400 to 600 AD.

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Kievan Rus, which means “Rus of Kyiv”, was a loose federation of peoples in Eastern Europe. They were scattered mostly in the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine, and in parts of western Russia. The Kievan Rus phenomenon began in the 9th century and was supplemented by the arrival of Norse raiders, and went on up to the 15th century, when the federation faced the mass invasion by the Mongol Horde.

It is interesting to note that the founders of the Kievan Rus were members of the Riurikid Dynasty, who were Viking traders. They travelled across the rivers of Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 8th century. According to mythology, the Kievan Rus originated with the semi-legendary Rurik (830-879), who came with his two brothers Sineus and Turvor between 859-862. The trio were Varangians, a name given to Vikings by the Greeks. Later, during the 10th-14th centuries, their descendants would become the Varangian Guard, the personal bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors.

The story is that Rurik’s brothers died, and in 862, he gained control of Ladoga and founded the Holmgard settlement near Novgorod. When Rurik died, his cousin Oleg (ruled 882-912) took charge, and by 885 the Rus expansion began to move southward towards Constantinople, attacking the city and attaining a trading treaty. Kiev was established as the capital and the Rus economy grew due to exports and their control over the three main trade routes across the region.

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Life on our planet developed millions of years ago, but if large life-forms are taken into consideration, then intelligent organisms like the Homo sapiens have never dominated any specific era or even a period. The Cenozoic Era can be known as the arrival and dominance of intelligent life-forms like modern human beings, which changed the world scenario permanently.

The term ‘Cenozoic’ has been derived from the Greek words: kainos meaning ‘new’ and zoe meaning ‘life’. It is the shortest era of the Earth, spanning from about 66 million years ago to the present. After the sudden K-T boundary mass extinction, mammals got a chance to evolve extensively in this era, and hence, it is also called ‘The Age of The Mammals’. The climate of our planet stabilized and atmospheric oxygen slowly increases with a simultaneous decrease in carbon dioxide and other toxic gaseous elements.

Earlier, the Cenozoic comprised two periods: Tertiary and Quaternary, the former being divided into Paleogene and Neogene, but now the term Tertiary is slowly phased out. Instead, the era is now divided into three periods: Paleogene, Neogene, and Quaternary, ranging from the oldest to the youngest. They are again subdivided into a number of stages/epochs. Apart from mammals, the Aves class of Chordates, i.e., the birds also evolved a lot, and several of them were larger than the average height of a human.

Credit: science.earthjay.com

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Early mammals were inauspicious creatures. The first mammal-like forms appear in the fossil record during the late Triassic period, about 225 million years ago. They were small, superficially shrew-like forms, some no longer than a few centimeters. In the shadow of the dinosaurs — a group that coincidentally also made its first appearance in the late Triassic — the early mammals were certainly less than imposing. Throughout the Mesozoic period — for over 160 million years — the largest mammal was no bigger than a ground hog. Moreover, the many wondrous and sometimes bizarre mammals we know today — such as the whales, bats, elephants, and scaly pangolins — were not part of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic scene.

Credit: Science Direct

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