Principality of Galicia-Volhynia

Kept his crown by their consent

formationDrafted from Rambaud, History of Russia, from the Earliest Times to 1880 (1880)

Galitch, in Rambaud's own description, was a genuinely different kind of Rus' principality - peopled by White Croats and marked, unlike the rising northeastern power of Suzdal, by a Slavonic character the Varangian conquest had never fully overwritten. "The prince," a Russian historian Rambaud quotes puts it, "was a prince of the old Slavonic type. He was elected by a popular assembly, and kept his crown by its consent." That assembly was in practice dominated by the richest men of the country, the boyars, who under Polish and Hungarian influence had raised themselves into a genuine aristocracy ruling in the prince's own name. When Prince Vladimir disgraced himself through drunkenness and the dishonoring of noble wives and daughters, the boyars simply summoned him to answer for it; Vladimir fled to Hungary rather than face them, and the throne passed, in 1188, to Roman, Prince of Volhynia - the first time the two principalities shared a single ruler.

Rambaud, History of Russia, from the Earliest Times to 1880 (1880) · Viacheslav Galievskyi · CC BY-SA 4.0

A crown won twice

The union did not hold. Hungary's own king restored Vladimir by force, then betrayed him, imprisoning his own protégé and installing his son instead - a Hungarian occupation the Galicians found harder to bear than any of their own quarrelsome native princes, and they expelled it and recalled Vladimir as soon as they could. Only after Vladimir's own death did Roman make his second and lasting bid, raising a Polish auxiliary army and conquering Galitch outright rather than waiting for another election. "This time," Rambaud writes, "Roman held the crown, not by election, but by conquest" - and he used that conquest to break the boyar aristocracy that had made and unmade princes at will, executing and confiscating the property of enemies with a severity a sympathetic Polish chronicler of the period called horrifying, even as Russian chroniclers praised the same ruler as an invincible hero who "flung himself like a lion upon the infidels."

You have done well to come at last

peakDrafted from Rambaud, History of Russia, from the Earliest Times to 1880 (1880)

Roman's death in 1205, killed in an unequal skirmish during a war with Poland, left the principality to two sons too young to rule. Daniel, the elder, was proclaimed prince the same year, but a child could not govern a country as turbulent as Galitch: the boyars tortured and hanged princes of Saint Vladimir's own blood, foreign armies from Poland and Hungary intervened at will, and Daniel was placed on the throne, expelled, and recalled so many times that Rambaud describes his whole infancy as "the toy of intriguing factions." The wandering adventurer-prince Mstislaf the Bold drove the Hungarians out at one point and married his own daughter to Daniel, but even that alliance only meant fresh wars, this time against Poland. It was a rough school, and by the time Mstislaf died in 1228 and Daniel took the throne of Galitch in earnest, he had already survived the disastrous Battle of the Kalka against the Tatars five years before.

A crown accepted from the horde

The Mongol invasion that followed dwarfed everything before it, driving Daniel from Galitch entirely and leaving the city in ruins. He fled to Hungary and worked from exile to rebuild what he could - inviting Germans, Armenians and Jews to resettle a country the Mongols had emptied, and granting them privileges that built real commerce even as they introduced, in Rambaud's own reading, a distinct and lasting ethnic presence alien to the surrounding population. Daniel held out against submission to the Mongols longer than most Rus' princes, and when he finally traveled to make his peace, the khan Batu greeted him with open approval: "You have done well to come at last." Batu spared him the usual humiliating rituals and, noticing his guest's distaste for fermented mare's milk, offered him a cup of wine instead - a small courtesy Daniel accepted without ever losing his own resentment of the arrangement it sealed.

Rambaud, History of Russia, from the Earliest Times to 1880 (1880) · Arpieyn I · CC BY-SA 4.0

A king crowned for a crusade that never came

Isolated within an Orthodox world now largely subject to the Mongols, Daniel turned to Rome. He promised Pope Innocent IV his support for reuniting the Eastern and Western churches and for a crusade against the Mongols, and in 1254 a papal legate crowned him King at Drohiczyn - Innocent's own gift of crown and scepter to a ruler he called his dear son. Neither the church union nor the crusade ever materialized, and Daniel weathered the reproaches of Innocent's successor without ever giving up the royal title itself. He spent his later years fighting in the wars of Central Europe with real distinction - a Hungarian chronicler Rambaud quotes marveled at the discipline of his troops, his Tatar-style weapons, and a prince's "Greek habit embroidered with gold" - and made one last attempt to throw off Mongol overlordship before superior force compelled him to dismantle his own fortresses and accept the yoke he had spent decades resisting.

A chronicle that stops mid-sentence

contractionDrafted from (eds.), Chapter XXI, "Russia, 1015-1462" (1932)

Daniel's death around 1265 did not end Galicia's brief golden age outright. For a time his sons kept the country in close contact with the West, marrying into western dynasties and maintaining the building and commerce their father had encouraged. But the political unity Daniel had held together by force of will did not survive division among his own heirs. The principality split between several princes, and a country that had once dictated terms to the Mongols and crowned a king with a pope's own blessing found itself unable to resist a new power rising on its own doorstep: Lithuania, whose dukes, by the century's end, had begun to eclipse Galicia as the dominant force in the Russian west.

A Tatar invasion worse than the first

The Mongols had not finished with Galicia either. A Tatar army under Khan Tulabugha invaded the principality on its way to raid Poland, laying waste to the country so thoroughly that Mirsky's own account judges it more destructive than Batu's original invasion a generation before - the land reduced, for a time, to grazing ground for nomad herds passing through rather than a functioning state in its own right.

National Széchényi Library, Budapest · (eds.), Chapter XXI, "Russia, 1015-1462" (1932) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A source that simply goes silent

What makes Galicia's final decades so hard to trace is not merely misfortune but the disappearance of the record itself. The Volhynian Chronicle - the same remarkable near-contemporary history that preserved Daniel's own reign and his sons' in such vivid detail - stops abruptly after 1292. For the half-century that followed, Mirsky's own account states plainly, there survives practically no source for Galician or Volhynian history at all. A principality once documented closely enough to record a Mongol khan offering its king a cup of wine instead of fermented milk simply falls out of the written record for two generations, isolated from the other Russian principalities and left, as its own western neighbors expanded around it, without a chronicler to say exactly how its own end approached.

Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg · (eds.), Chapter XXI, "Russia, 1015-1462" (1932) · Nikolay Omonov · CC0

Lost to Russia

endDrafted from (eds.), Chapter XXI, "Russia, 1015-1462" (1932)

Daniel died in 1264, closing, in Rambaud's own words, "one of the most memorable and most chequered careers in the history of Russia" - a life that had run through the civil wars of a turbulent childhood, the ruin and exile the Mongol invasion brought in his prime, and decades of negotiation and war with Poland, Hungary and Rome that left him, by his own historian's judgment, no rest at any point. Rambaud's own assessment is unambiguous about what all of it ultimately achieved: "no prince better deserved to free Southern Russia, but his activity and talents struggled in vain against the fate of his country."

(eds.), Chapter XXI, "Russia, 1015-1462" (1932) · A. Gogenberg · Public domain

A crown that outlived its own kingdom, until it didn't

The principality did not collapse with its own greatest ruler. Galitch passed to Daniel's descendants and continued for generations afterward, still carrying the royal title Innocent IV's legate had conferred, even as the surviving record of its own final decades grows thinner than for any other stretch of its history. What is known for certain is the outcome: in 1347, a kingdom whose founding prince had won his own throne twice over, by election and then by conquest, and whose son had been crowned by a pope's own hand, was absorbed into the kingdom of Poland - no particular battle or treaty earning a name in the surviving record, a territorial fact rather than a dramatic reversal. Its boyar aristocracy went over to Rome and Polish civilization along with it; the common people of its own cities, Lviv chief among them, did not, staying Orthodox and Russian long enough to help carry a Ukrainian revival forward two and a half centuries later.

(eds.), Chapter XXI, "Russia, 1015-1462" (1932) · Arpieyn I · CC BY-SA 4.0