WRITING TOWARDS THE end of his life, Prince Vladimir Monomakh (d. 1125) of Kyiv (Kiev) gave his sons the following advice in his twelfth-century Instructions (Pouchenie): “Love your wives, but grant them no power [vlast’] over you.” From Old Norse sagas and Latin sources, it is known that Vladimir's first wife was the Anglo-Saxon princess Gytha, the daughter of the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Harold Godwineson. The thirteenth-century necrology of the monastery of Saint Pantaleon in Cologne commemorates her as “Queen Gytha.” Yet her husband's advice book for his sons never mentions her by name, or acknowledges her role as a patron. The contrast between Gytha's status as “queen” according to external sources and her own husband's dismissal of her position raises the wider question of what social and political roles a princess could hold in Kyivan (Kievan) Rus’, a term first coined by scholars in the nineteenth century to describe the medieval land that included present-day Belarus’, Ukraine, and Russia. This chapter explores the scope of social and political activities available to princesses in Rus’, focusing on the period of Christianization from the reign of Princess Ol’ga (Scandinavian: Helga, d. 969) up to 1240/ 41, when Kyiv was incorporated into the Mongol Empire. The year 1240/ 41 provides a convenient end point for this study. After 1240/ 41 not only did geopolitics change but so, gradually, did the status of elite women, to the point that, beginning in the fourteenth century, Muscovite elite women were strictly secluded in their homes and could emerge in public only if veiled.

By the eleventh century a vast territory of over 500,000 square miles (800,000 kilometers) in present-day eastern Europe was ruled by a single clan, known in fifteenth-century sources onwards as the Riurikid dynasty (the Riurikovichi) after the semi-legendary ninth-century Varangian (Viking) leader Riurik (Scandinavian: Hrorikr). According to the twelfth-century Primary Chronicle, also known from its opening lines as the Tale of Bygone Years, in 862 various quarrelling East Slavic tribes invited the Varangian Riurik and his two brothers to settle in their territory and rule over them.