Yaropolk I of Kiev

Yaropolk I Sviatoslavich was a Rurikid prince who held Kiev in the late tenth century, in the generation before the official conversion of Rus'. He was the eldest son of Sviatoslav I Igorevich, the campaigning prince who struck at the Khazars, the Volga Bulgars, and the Byzantine positions in the Balkans. Neither the name of Yaropolk's mother nor a contemporary record of his birthplace or birth year has survived; estimates sometimes offered in later literature are conjectural. Before his last southern campaigns, Sviatoslav assigned his sons to the principal centres of the realm: Yaropolk received Kiev, his brother Oleg was placed over the Drevlians, and their half-brother Vladimir, son of the stewardess Malusha, was sent to Novgorod. After Pechenegs killed Sviatoslav at the Dnieper rapids in 972, Yaropolk remained the senior prince in Kiev.

A feud among the brothers ended the partition. The Primary Chronicle relates that Oleg killed Lyut, son of Yaropolk's commander Sveneld, during a hunt, and that Sveneld then urged war on the Drevlians. Oleg was defeated near Ovruch and died after falling from a bridge into the moat. Yaropolk annexed the Drevlian land. Vladimir, hearing of Oleg's fate, fled overseas to Scandinavia, and Yaropolk installed his own governors in Novgorod, becoming for a short interval the sole ruler of the Rus' lands. Western annals record that envoys of the Rus' appeared at Emperor Otto I's assembly at Quedlinburg in 973. Historians have often connected that mission with Yaropolk's reign and with possible diplomatic or ecclesiastical contact with the Ottonian court, but the sources do not state the envoys' instructions, and later Muscovite claims that Yaropolk received papal legates and favoured Latin Christianity remain unconfirmed by early narrative texts.

Vladimir returned from Scandinavia with a Varangian force, recovered Novgorod, and moved south. He seized Polotsk, killing Prince Rogvolod and taking Rogvolod's daughter Rogneda, then advanced on Kiev and suborned Yaropolk's voivode Blud. On Blud's advice Yaropolk abandoned the city and shut himself in the fortress of Rodnya at the mouth of the Ros, where siege and famine were severe enough to leave a proverbial memory of woe. Blud then persuaded him to go in person to treat with Vladimir. When Yaropolk entered the hall, two Varangians killed him with swords. The Primary Chronicle places the killing in Kiev under the year 980; some modern reconstructions of the early chronicle chronology prefer 978. Vladimir thereby obtained Kiev.

The same chronicle states that Yaropolk's wife was a Greek woman who had been a nun, given to him by Sviatoslav because of her beauty; her personal name is not recorded in the early sources. After Yaropolk's death Vladimir took this woman, who was already pregnant, and she bore Sviatopolk, later called Sviatopolk the Accursed. The chronicle presents Sviatopolk as Yaropolk's son and says Vladimir disliked him as a child of two fathers; no other children are securely attested. Early sources do not describe Yaropolk as baptized. In 1044 his nephew Yaroslav the Wise had the bones of Yaropolk and Oleg taken from their graves, baptized, and reinterred in the Church of the Tithes in Kiev. Yaropolk remains a brief and ill-fated senior prince whose fall opened the long reign of Vladimir and the subsequent official Christianization of Rus'.