Polotsk

They needed money.

And in this case, with the chaos after Izyaslav, a son of Yaroslav the Wise, you know, you had wars against Polotsk.

My God, they even went to Rome and he actually converted to Catholicism.

There were a lot of minor civil wars that plagued old Kiev.

This is the Judaizing Heresy.

A migration of Jews from Poland to the east, including White Russia, Belarus, should also be noted in the 15th century.

There were lessers of tolls and other assessments in Minsk, Polotsk, and in S- Smolensk, although no settled congregations were formed there.

After the short-lived banishment of the Jews from Lithuania, 1496, the eastward movement went forth with particular energy at the beginning of the 16th century.

Relying on previous history, they decided that a dynastic alliance was the only real solution, and proposed that Alexander marry Ivan's daughter.

Jan Zabirzynski, governor of Polotsk, and Nicholas Radziwill, the chancellor of Lithuania and voivode of Vilnius, began testing the waters almost as soon as Alexander took the throne, through private messages to Yakov Zakharin, the governor of Novgorod, and Ivan Petrikayev.

By all accounts, Ivan was pleased with the proposal and instructed his boyars to negotiate the marriage with the ratification of his Lithuanian annexations.

Achieving that and placing his daughter in Vilnius to act as his source of information and influence would be another major success.

He came to power through war against his brother, Yaropolk, who was killed, and the chronicles hold Vladimir responsible.

He also took Rognada, princess of Polotsk, by force after killing her father, and kept multiple wives and concubines as a pagan ruler.

Mm-hmm.

Then when he was baptized around 988, he made Christianity the religion of the Kievan Rus, Rus, and was remembered for charity toward the poor.

The chronicle I told you about, the one compiled in Kiev around 1100, has an entry that shows you what that looked like in the mind of the time, and I'm going to give it to you, because it is an early account of dead riders feared in this part of the world, and it is short, and it is strange.

Under the year 1092, the monk writes that a great wonder appeared in the city of Polotsk, far to the north.

At night, in the streets, there was a stamping and a sound of running and of something groaning as though men were going through the town and nothing could be seen.

And if anyone came out of his house to look, he was struck, invisibly, by whatever was there and he sickened and died so the people of Polotsk stopped going out at night and then it began to happen by day as well riders in the streets in daylight that nobody could see though the hooves of their horses could be seen and people dying of it and the chronicler writes down what the people of Polotsk said about it, which is the reason the entry exists.

They said, the dead are beating the people of Polotsk.

The dead.

He records the people using the old word for the departed.

The keys opened an armored room in Mogilev that held the most revered relic in Belarus, a jeweled cross whose inscription curses anyone who carries it away.

The cross was made in 1161 for Euphrosyne of Polotsk, which isn't the sort of place you generally expect a World War II mystery to begin.

She was born Predslava, a granddaughter of Seslav, the Polotsk prince whom medieval tradition remembered as a sorcerer.

At twelve, she entered a convent rather than marry, spent years copying books by hand, and eventually founded her own monastery just outside the city.

Its small stone Church of the Savior still stands, and it was for that church that she commissioned a reliquary from a goldsmith named Lazar Bogsha.

What Bogsha delivered was a six-armed cross about twenty inches tall, built on cypress wood, sheathed front and back in gold, and along its sides in gilded silver.

It carried twenty miniature enamel portraits of Christ, Mary, archangels, and saints, with pearls strung along the front edge and a set of large gemstones.

Sealed inside were relics that probably reached Polotsk from Constantinople.

They needed money.

And in this case, with the chaos after Izyaslav, the son of Yaroslav the Wise, you know, you had wars against Polotsk.

My God, they even went to Rome and he actually converted to Catholicism.

There were a lot of minor civil wars that plagued old Kiev.

This is the Judaizing Heresy.

A migration of Jews from Poland to the east, including White Russia, Belarus, should also be noted in the fifteenth century.

There were lessers of tolls and other assessments in Minsk, Polotsk, and in S- Smolensk, although no settled congregations were formed there.

After the short-lived banishment of the Jews from Lithuania, fourteen ninety-six, the eastward movement went forth with particular energy at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

She passed away in 1911.

Vseslav was the very real ruler of Polotsk in what's now known as Belarus.

Known as Vseslav the Sorcerer for his rumored magical prowess, he was also believed to take the form of a wolf.

He passed in 1101, but the legend didn't stop there.

This king brought the lands belonging to his realm into closer connection with Kiev by giving them as governors his own sons instead of other princes.

The countries governed by his sons occupied all the territory of present-day Ukraine, as well as the provinces of Novgorod, Pskov, Polosk, and Smolensk.

Footnote.

To this day, there is a slight dialectic analogy between the Ukrainians and the Novgorodians.