Under Yaroslav Russia enjoyed a prosperity and position that was lost in the partitions and discords of his successors, and this circumstance was probably responsible for the somewhat flattering estimate that was formed of his character by subsequent chroniclers.[21] As patron of Kiev and benefactor to the Church he was naturally glorious and good in the eyes of Nestor, and by some writers he has been styled “the Russian Charlemagne,” on account of the code of laws which he formulated for his country. Concerning his piety, he lived in an age when much giving from the State treasury to church or monastery counted for such, and it is recorded of him that his dying words charged his sons to “treat each other as brothers” and “have great tenderness” one for another. His own brother still lay in the prison that was his living tomb for over a score of years.
[8] Kiev was subsequently invested with a past of respectable antiquity, the consecration of its site being attributed to the Apostle Andrew; it makes its entry on the pages of the _Chronicle_, however, simply as a _gorodok_, or townlet.
[10] Schiemann, _Russland, Polen, und Livland_.
[12] _Kniaz_, Prince; _velikie-Kniaz_, Grand Prince.
[20] Although loth to introduce a fresh spelling for a word which has already been rendered in some dozen or more forms by English, French, and German historians, I have thought it best to follow the Russian orthography of this Slavonic title.
[21] Karamzin, Solov’ev, Schiemann, Rambaud, _Chronique de Nestor_.
The history of Russia during the next two hundred years is little more than a long chronicle of aimless and inconsequent feuds between the multiple Princes of the Blood--“the much-too-many” of their crowded little world--overlaid and beclouded with strange-sounding names recurring and clashing in a luxuriant tangle of pedigree, and further embarrassed by a perpetual shifting and reshifting of the family appanages. Here and there the figure of some particular kniaz stands out for a space from the ravelled skein that the old historians painstakingly wove upon the loom of their chronicles, but for the most part the student searches in vain for glimpses of the real life-story of Russia during this barren and over-trampled period.