Summary:

Mari Isoaho, The relationships, power, and friends of Prince Yaroslav Vsevolodovich (1190 – 1246)

This article surveys the range of contacts and political allies of Prince Yaroslav Vsevolodovich, trying to seek weather there is anything insinuating contacts which can be regarded as some sort of a friendship. The subject of this survey is derived from the notion of how deeply different kinds of human relationships affected the life of medieval people when compared to, for example, the lives of modern-day people, where many faceless institutions and a net of laws and rules restricts the human behaviour. As Yaroslav was on the top of the power hierarchy in medieval Russian lands, his social network was wide. The task, however, is very problematic, since the Russian medieval chronicles include only few details of the matters of Yaroslav’s personal life. Furthermore, the usage of the word friend (drug) in medieval Russian sources is very rare, and made way into wider literary usage only after the Middle Ages. The compact and condensed style of chronicle narration also leaves too much details of his personal life out of its sphere. This article, however, brings out the important concept of how little there is actual knowledge about the essential social phenomenon, such as family and marriage customs in medieval Russian lands. Its most important conclusion is that the relationship between the Russian princes and the polovtsy aristocracy of the steppes during the first half of the 13th century has been largely neglected in the historical study.