Rus' and Muscovy

The river road from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and the principalities built along it: a federation of trading cities converted from Constantinople, shattered by the Mongols, and reassembled — over two centuries as a tribute-collecting vassal — by the one city among them that outlasted its own masters.

The line below is a time axis. Position on it is date, so concurrency is visible: concurrent polities sit side by side rather than in sequence.

1 sourced edge runs between this region and another, to The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Those are not drawn on this line — a thread that crossed regions would assert a sequence nobody cited — but they are on each polity’s own page.