In this episode, we look at what we know about how the ordinary people of Rus lived.
[00:00:25] Hello and welcome to the Russian Empire History Podcast.
[00:00:30] The history of all the peoples of the Russian Empire.
[00:00:34] I'm your host, JP Bristow.
[00:00:37] This is Season 1, The Forest, The Step, and The Birth of the Russian Empire.
[00:00:42] And Episode 51, Life in Rus.
[00:00:46] Before we begin, Stjofan sent a message through Spotify,
[00:00:54] and since there doesn't seem to be a way to respond there, I'll answer here.
[00:01:00] Stjofan says,
[00:01:01] There are so many paid Patreon episodes now. It was never like this when you started.
[00:01:08] I guess it is indeed true that before I was doing member episodes, there were no member episodes,
[00:01:14] and now I am doing them, they gradually accumulate.
[00:01:18] But I would like to reassure Stjofan and anyone else who's concerned
[00:01:23] that the main narrative will always be here in the free podcast.
[00:01:28] The member episodes cover additional supplementary subjects,
[00:01:32] things that I think are interesting or that don't fit into the main narrative.
[00:01:39] For instance, we're currently looking at the history of Central Asia.
[00:01:43] The Russian conquest of Central Asia mostly takes place in the mid-19th century.
[00:01:50] If I waited until we got there, it would be rather an interruption to say,
[00:01:55] So who are the people of Buchara?
[00:01:58] and then jump back 2000 years.
[00:02:01] And not everyone wants that level of detail, interesting as it may be.
[00:02:06] So subjects like that will be covered in the member episodes for those who do want the detail.
[00:02:15] I realise some people may just dislike the paywall altogether,
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[00:02:46] Anyway, on with the show.
[00:02:49] Greetings to Onfim from Anna.
[00:02:57] My Lord Brother, look after my case against Constantine.
[00:03:01] Declare to him before witnesses.
[00:03:03] Because you brought a claim against my sister and against her daughter,
[00:03:07] and called my sister a cow and her daughter a whore,
[00:03:10] now Boris has returned and hearing that accusation,
[00:03:13] he drove my sister out and tried to kill her.
[00:03:17] Then, my Lord Brother, tell him this.
[00:03:19] Tell him this.
[00:03:21] You brought this accusation and now you must prove it.
[00:03:24] If Constantine says that I swore surety for my son-in-law,
[00:03:29] tell him this.
[00:03:30] If there are witnesses against my sister who say that she swore surety for her son-in-law,
[00:03:37] I will be responsible to you for it.
[00:03:40] So, Brother, investigate any accusation or claim against me,
[00:03:44] and if there are witnesses to it, then I am not your sister or my husband's wife.
[00:03:52] This letter was written on birch bark and found preserved in clay excavations in Novgorod.
[00:03:59] The first was found in 1951, since when over a thousand such manuscripts have been found.
[00:04:07] The absolute majority were found in Novgorod,
[00:04:10] but we also have a smaller number from other old towns.
[00:04:14] Smolensk, Tver, Ryazan, from Palatsk and Vityapsk in modern Belarus,
[00:04:19] and from Valinia.
[00:04:22] Even though the absolute majority of the messages were found in Novgorod,
[00:04:27] the only reason for this is that they have been preserved by a waterlogged layer of clay
[00:04:32] that forms an anaerobic preservation chamber.
[00:04:36] There's every reason to think that they are representative of use across Rus.
[00:04:43] For a start, many of them are actually letters to or from people in other parts of Rus,
[00:04:49] which, even if they are from Novgorodians away from town,
[00:04:54] shows that there was a system in place for delivering them.
[00:04:58] Their content is entirely quotidian,
[00:05:02] showing that the writers saw writing these messages as an everyday practice.
[00:05:08] So even if the first one to be found in, say,
[00:05:12] Moscow only turned up when making some repairs to the entry to Red Square in the late 80s,
[00:05:18] this just means that the local conditions in other parts of Rus
[00:05:22] were not as conducive to their preservation as they are in Novgorod.
[00:05:31] The manuscripts date from the 11th to 14th centuries
[00:05:35] and are one of the best pieces of evidence that we have of what life in Rus was like,
[00:05:41] because they are mostly written by ordinary people about day-to-day things,
[00:05:46] some personal, some business,
[00:05:48] and in a vernacular language, sometimes including obscenities,
[00:05:53] rather than the Old Church Slavonic-influenced language of ecclesiastical text.
[00:06:00] Almost all the texts are in this vernacular, with a handful in Old Church Slavonic,
[00:06:07] one in Old Norse, and one in an archaic form of Karelian,
[00:06:11] which is the oldest known text in a Finnic language.
[00:06:18] They were written by scratching the characters into the birch bark with a stylus,
[00:06:24] of which more than 200 have been found, usually iron but sometimes bronze or bone.
[00:06:34] Because they are written by ordinary people, what they are about can tell us about their lives.
[00:06:42] In this letter from Anna to her brother Onfim,
[00:06:46] the first thing we see is that Anna is either literate or had access to someone who would
[00:06:52] write a letter that she dictated, and the same for her brother.
[00:06:57] She is mixed up in something with a man named Konstantin,
[00:07:01] who has accused her and her daughter of sexual impropriety.
[00:07:06] A very serious charge for a woman in medieval Rus, grounds for divorce and other punishments.
[00:07:15] Anna asserts that the claim, which her husband appears to believe is true,
[00:07:20] is false and perhaps linked to Konstantin also claiming that she guaranteed a debt of her son-in-law.
[00:07:28] By saying that if he can find any witnesses she will agree to responsible,
[00:07:34] Anna would also appear to be denying that she ever guaranteed any such debt.
[00:07:41] Regardless of the facts of this individual case,
[00:07:44] this suggests that women had standing to enter into deals like this
[00:07:49] and that therefore they had some kind of control over their own property,
[00:07:54] which she would need to be able to give any guarantee.
[00:08:00] Anna informing her brother that Konstantin has brought a claim against her
[00:08:05] and asking him to act for her shows that there was some form of dispute resolution available.
[00:08:12] But because her husband has listened to Konstantin's allegations and thrown her out,
[00:08:18] she is forced to ask her brother to defend her.
[00:08:23] So even if she was able to act as a surety for a debt,
[00:08:27] she appears to have lacked the standing to properly defend herself
[00:08:32] and needed the protection of her male next of kin, a husband, brother or father.
[00:08:40] However, we can also see that a man's mere word is not enough to convict her.
[00:08:46] She demands that he provide proof and witnesses if he can find them to back up his claim.
[00:08:54] Finally, although she requires a man, her brother, to act for her,
[00:08:59] she feels quite comfortable instructing him exactly how to go about it
[00:09:04] and her letter comes off as rather assured but not in the slightest obsequious.
[00:09:13] One of the best known authors of Birchbark manuscripts was a boy named Onfim.
[00:09:19] At least that is the standard Russian version of his name.
[00:09:22] Recall last episode I mentioned that Novgorod had its own dialect,
[00:09:28] a form of East Slavic that was diverging from the dialect that would go on to form Russian.
[00:09:34] Most of our knowledge of this old Novgorodian comes from these Birchbark manuscripts,
[00:09:40] which are mostly written in the Novgorodian dialect.
[00:09:45] He wrote his name as Onfime, a Christian name derived from Anthemius.
[00:09:53] Seventeen of Onfime's Birchbark manuscripts have now been found.
[00:09:59] He wrote them when he was six or seven years old while he was learning how to write.
[00:10:05] Most of them are writing exercises with some drawings.
[00:10:09] There is a picture of a knight on a horse,
[00:10:12] stabbing someone on the ground with a lance and his name written next to it.
[00:10:16] We of course guessed that this was him daydreaming about growing up to be a hero.
[00:10:22] He also drew a fire-breathing dragon with the text
[00:10:26] I am a wild beast and a message. Greetings from Onfime to Danilo.
[00:10:32] The exercises include the alphabet, common syllables and lines from the Psalms.
[00:10:39] It's easy to see the universal experiences of childhood in these 800-year-old texts.
[00:10:47] Most of the texts show us similar scenes from everyday life.
[00:10:52] There are inventories of dowries, a necklace, earrings, sheepskin coats,
[00:10:59] three embroidered ribbons with a headdress, six sponges, a feather bed and pillows,
[00:11:05] five dark dresses and three white dresses, a pot of honey, a washstand and a chest.
[00:11:13] There are short prayers asking for blessings in childbirth and sickness,
[00:11:18] protection on the road or success in business dealings.
[00:11:23] Three nines of angels, three nines of archangels,
[00:11:27] deliver the servant of God Plument from the Ague by the prayers of the Holy Mother of God.
[00:11:32] There are messages to family members, travelling or living in another village.
[00:11:39] Greetings from Smin to my daughter-in-law.
[00:11:42] If you have not already remembered, you have malt.
[00:11:45] There is rye malt in the cellar that you can take.
[00:11:48] There is plenty of meal for bread. Take what you need.
[00:11:51] The meat is in the hayloft. From Stepan to my wife Olyssava.
[00:11:58] Sell the house and come here to Smalensk or Kiev.
[00:12:01] Bread is cheaper. If you don't come, send me a letter saying you were well.
[00:12:11] And messages to lovers.
[00:12:13] May your heart and body and soul burn for me and for my body and for the sight of me.
[00:12:20] Against our lack of literary sources from the period,
[00:12:24] these manuscripts really stand out for how relatable they are.
[00:12:29] Maybe the religious stuff is unfamiliar but the sentiments and concerns
[00:12:33] are just the same ordinary human problems that have been throughout history.
[00:12:37] And we can easily imagine the writer and their situation.
[00:12:46] You'll remember that we've heard several times that we have little evidence of literacy in
[00:12:51] Rus. There are probably more mentions of people reading or writing books in the tale
[00:12:56] than we have actual books that have survived.
[00:13:00] And most of what we have is ecclesiastical
[00:13:03] and therefore by definition of limited use in telling us about people's lives.
[00:13:08] This makes these little birch bark notes even more important.
[00:13:14] You've probably noticed that they sound like people talking.
[00:13:19] That is, they reflect oral rather than literary culture.
[00:13:23] If we think about what went on over the period the manuscripts reflect,
[00:13:28] we can make the assumption that the relationship between spoken and written
[00:13:33] language was changing.
[00:13:35] In the 11th century, the time of the earliest finds,
[00:13:39] literacy was still new and probably rare.
[00:13:43] People would naturally have written as they spoke
[00:13:46] rather than following literary conventions which take time to appear.
[00:13:52] By the latest finds from the 16th century,
[00:13:56] writing had certainly become more common.
[00:14:03] This means that historians can use the birch bark notes to try to detect various phenomena.
[00:14:10] They can look at whether they become more bookish over time,
[00:14:14] or whether they support the idea of a native literary language
[00:14:18] developing alongside the ecclesiastical one for discussing worldly subjects.
[00:14:26] These trends do not have to only go in one direction.
[00:14:30] If you think about some of the events that go on over this period,
[00:14:34] the Mongol conquest, the Baltic Crusades, the plague,
[00:14:38] not to mention other natural disasters, floods, famines that were always occurring,
[00:14:44] you'll see that there can also be periods where literacy declines.
[00:14:53] While the oldest birch bark texts date from around the time of the Christianisation of Rus,
[00:14:59] scholars are still debating the relationship between ecclesiastical and secular writing.
[00:15:07] The first point is that we can set a starting date for ecclesiastical writing, more or less.
[00:15:14] We can't say the same for secular writing.
[00:15:17] Some scholars argue that there was already a native Slavic script in use in the pre-Christian
[00:15:24] period, which leads to arguments about where it came from and when.
[00:15:30] Their opponents dismissed the evidence these scholars rely on as the result of wrong dating
[00:15:37] or not being actual Slavic writing and proposed that the Rus only started writing
[00:15:43] after their conversion. One such scholar, Alexei Gipius, describes the birch bark manuscripts
[00:15:52] as a convergence of writing as a fundamental attribute of Christian culture
[00:15:58] and the oral practices of everyday urban life. This naturally gives rise to their great variety.
[00:16:06] Quote, The use of Cyrillic script for practical purposes left plenty of room for variation
[00:16:14] on different levels. Much depended here on the competence and literary ambitions of a scribe.
[00:16:21] The handwriting may be professional or amateur.
[00:16:25] Orthography may be the same as that of the church manuscripts or deviate from it.
[00:16:30] And the language may be pure old Novgorod dialect or the standardized version.
[00:16:36] Avoiding local features as non-prestigious.
[00:16:40] And last but not least, vocabulary and phraseology may or may not be influenced by
[00:16:46] church Slavonic. End quote. Given our lack of sources we will probably never be able to
[00:16:54] determine whether writing appeared in Rus independently of the church.
[00:16:59] We can see some features in the manuscripts that show that people were literate.
[00:17:04] For instance, their organization, formulation and information density.
[00:17:11] As you've heard in the examples that I read out, they start with an address and end with
[00:17:16] some kind of formula. Over time these greetings become more expressive,
[00:17:22] which scholars link to the development of social differentiation.
[00:17:27] Spelling mistakes are rare. The most common subject is money.
[00:17:37] People send notes reminding their wives to collect a debt, asking for money or goods
[00:17:42] to be sent or to inform the recipient of a deal that they needed to carry out.
[00:17:49] Lists of inventory, prices and debts are another common category.
[00:17:55] Sometimes there are notes about disputes. A man might write to the local authorities
[00:18:00] to complain that his brother's debt was collected from him,
[00:18:04] even though he did not act as a guarantor for his brother.
[00:18:08] The notes refer to amounts, hridnya or other units, kuna, deviritsas, nogatas and rizanas,
[00:18:18] which were all based on a silver standard, which was in turn based on those Islamic
[00:18:24] silver dirhams that had flowed up the trade routes from Central Asia.
[00:18:29] You might recall me mentioning that this flow of silver had dwindled away by this time,
[00:18:35] and we also don't have any evidence for large inflows of Western European or Byzantine coinage.
[00:18:44] The Rus never minted much coinage of their own.
[00:18:48] There were some prestige pieces produced by rulers looking to assert their independence
[00:18:54] and legitimacy, but by the 12th century actual coins were so rare it gets referred
[00:19:00] to as the coinless period.
[00:19:04] Silver was used as a medium of exchange in the form of ingots. Coins were melted down
[00:19:10] and lumps of silver were traded at the value of their weight.
[00:19:16] From those units that I mentioned, hridnya typically referred to metal.
[00:19:22] When we say the druzhina, out collecting tribute, brought 300 hridna from some town or city,
[00:19:29] it usually means that they brought that weight in silver.
[00:19:33] But outside of high value transactions, other things were used.
[00:19:39] Vveritsa and kuna were squirrel and martinskins.
[00:19:44] Like silver, they also came to have a standard value.
[00:19:48] One hridnya was equal to 25 kunas or 150 ververitsas.
[00:19:55] Other items like glass beads or spindle walls also had a standard value.
[00:20:02] So when people wrote asking for payment or listing debts,
[00:20:06] they were talking about an exchange of these items rather than money.
[00:20:14] Although the church was against usury, references to interest are common.
[00:20:20] The standard rate was called at a third, charged annually, and meant for example
[00:20:26] that if you borrowed 10 hridnya, you would have to repay 15 hridnya a year later.
[00:20:35] If you recall our discussion of the Ruskaya Pravda,
[00:20:38] the first version, the short pravda, contained rules governing the liability
[00:20:44] for physical injury and how the druzhina should behave.
[00:20:49] Revisions to the pravda by Vladimir Monomakh and Svyatopolk added lending rules
[00:20:55] requiring for example that witnesses be present to make a loan of more than 3 hridnya valid.
[00:21:03] An order of seniority was established for the creditors of a debtor unable to pay.
[00:21:09] Lenders from out of town had the first claim, locals came second.
[00:21:14] If the debtor's property was insufficient,
[00:21:17] he could be sold into slavery and the proceeds distributed to his creditors.
[00:21:25] By the 12th century, Rus was getting richer.
[00:21:29] Churches, palaces, fortresses and other public spaces were being built.
[00:21:34] Building them expanded the skilled artisan class.
[00:21:38] Growing cities needed supplies, which increased the merchant class.
[00:21:44] In short, there was economic growth everywhere, and that in turn meant more people with money
[00:21:50] and property and more demand for protection of their rights and interests.
[00:21:57] While this meant that the rulers of Rus did become more involved in the lives of their subjects,
[00:22:03] increasing taxation and regulation, the birch bark letters show us that most relationships,
[00:22:10] commerce and disputes continued to be governed by custom and arbitrated by customary means,
[00:22:18] rather than by official representatives of the authorities.
[00:22:24] Economic development creates social stratification, but Rus society was not radically changed.
[00:22:33] If you are from the English or French speaking world,
[00:22:37] you probably think about the Middle Ages in terms of feudalism and centralisation.
[00:22:43] That is a pyramid of reciprocal obligations of service and protection
[00:22:49] from the ruler at the top down to the peasants at the base.
[00:22:53] Society divided into estates, the nobility, clergy and peasantry.
[00:23:00] Neither estates nor a system of reciprocal obligations between different social classes
[00:23:06] existed in Rus.
[00:23:09] We'll get into whether or how much it ever exists in Eastern Europe later on in the show.
[00:23:18] In the Soviet historiography, these societies do get called feudal.
[00:23:25] Because in the Marxist dogma, feudalism was a necessary stage in social development.
[00:23:31] But the institutions of Western European feudalism are missing.
[00:23:37] This links back to the discussions about the role of the Vietche and whether Novgorod was
[00:23:43] a republic that were raised in the Q&A episode.
[00:23:46] Because if there were no estates, there could be no representation of those estates either.
[00:23:57] The basic secular social unit was the extended family living in a dvor,
[00:24:03] a compound that could include workshops and land for growing food as well as living space.
[00:24:10] There is some archaeological evidence to suggest that craftsmen of a particular type
[00:24:16] may have clustered together.
[00:24:18] But we have no evidence for a collective identity or organisation.
[00:24:24] There is no evidence for trade guilds, for instance.
[00:24:29] Society consisted of boyas, the nobility, muzhiy, the freemen, and ludi gradsky, the townspeople.
[00:24:40] The rest, referred to as the prostatachad, the simple folk, were workers for hire,
[00:24:47] zakupy or hrydovichy.
[00:24:50] And finally there were slaves, chlopy.
[00:24:53] The freemen and the townspeople had the right to participate in the Vietche,
[00:25:00] which was essentially a gathering in the town square.
[00:25:05] The chronicles do not provide us with a consistent picture of the Vietche
[00:25:09] and there were probably local variations in the relevant customs and procedures.
[00:25:14] As Franklin and Shepard state,
[00:25:17] one should probably not ascribe a fixed and formal constitutional role to the Vietche
[00:25:23] during this period.
[00:25:24] Vietche was a generic word for the means of mobilising urban opinion,
[00:25:29] a periodic event rather than an institution of government.
[00:25:40] Neither was there any significant administration of the king's justice,
[00:25:44] a key element in the development of governance in the West.
[00:25:48] The birchbark letters showed that people did not ask the prince or judges
[00:25:52] for protection or enforcement.
[00:25:54] They relied on customs, witnesses and public oaths or guarantors.
[00:26:00] The oaths and proceedings themselves were not recorded.
[00:26:04] The system was self-regulating.
[00:26:12] The Pravda provided some rules that tell us about the status of women.
[00:26:17] There were some basic protections.
[00:26:19] Their parents were liable if a girl harmed herself when forced into a marriage
[00:26:23] that she did not want,
[00:26:25] but it was assumed that the parents would decide who a girl would marry.
[00:26:30] A woman could inherit only if she had no brothers,
[00:26:34] but her dowry was supposed to be her property.
[00:26:37] It was intended to provide a cushion if she ended up needing to take care of herself
[00:26:42] for some reason.
[00:26:44] But as you might imagine,
[00:26:46] it could be difficult for a woman to keep her property separate from her husband's,
[00:26:51] and that could leave a woman vulnerable.
[00:26:54] In one of the birchbark letters,
[00:26:56] a woman asks for help because her husband has taken all of her property
[00:27:00] and abandoned her for a new wife.
[00:27:08] As Christianity deepened its presence in Rus,
[00:27:12] this situation might have become somewhat rarer.
[00:27:15] The church was strongly concerned with enforcing monogamy
[00:27:19] and preventing divorce,
[00:27:21] especially men abandoning their wives.
[00:27:24] Rules appeared banning men from throwing out wives that were sick,
[00:27:29] another situation that we find described in the birchbark messages.
[00:27:35] Thinking back to the letter that we heard at the beginning,
[00:27:39] Anna's accuser could have been fined for making allegations of impropriety
[00:27:43] against another man's wife and daughter.
[00:27:46] A man could also be fined for beating another man's wife,
[00:27:52] but a husband could beat his own.
[00:27:56] These rules around marriage were enforced by the church,
[00:27:59] and complainants could take their case to the bishop.
[00:28:07] In the dangerous world of the middle ages,
[00:28:10] as many as 20% of women could find themselves widowed while still young.
[00:28:16] The family property passed to the children.
[00:28:19] If they were still minors,
[00:28:21] the widow held it in trust for them.
[00:28:23] A widow who was not young enough to remarry
[00:28:26] could end up entirely dependent on charity,
[00:28:29] which was also encouraged by the church.
[00:28:34] Although numerous birchbark letters to or from women list debts or purchases,
[00:28:41] we do not know about how or whether
[00:28:44] the women of Rus were involved in the production of goods.
[00:28:48] Some spindle walls have been found with women's names engraved on them,
[00:28:53] so it's quite likely that a household's women produced cloth,
[00:28:58] often women's work in other societies.
[00:29:01] But we have no indication whether they did so for sale
[00:29:04] or only for the family's own needs.
[00:29:12] If we go back to the only story of a woman that we have had so far,
[00:29:17] Olga of Kiev,
[00:29:18] we can see that even though we know the whole purpose of the story
[00:29:22] was propagandizing Vladimir's role in the conversion of Rus,
[00:29:27] it still fits within this framework of women's lives in Rus.
[00:29:31] She receives marriage proposals,
[00:29:34] conducts her husband's funeral,
[00:29:36] raises her children and guards the realm for when they come of age.
[00:29:41] She is not presented as a ruler in her own right.
[00:29:46] There can be no question that women were second-class citizens in Rus.
[00:29:51] In Vladimir Monomakh's instruction to his sons,
[00:29:54] he wrote,
[00:29:56] Love your wife but do not give her power over you.
[00:30:00] Although we can find this kind of patriarchal society almost everywhere,
[00:30:05] Rus was even more male-dominated than Western Europe or Byzantium.
[00:30:12] As noted many times,
[00:30:14] the chronicles do not even bother to name women,
[00:30:17] let alone tell us what they did.
[00:30:20] While in other contemporary societies,
[00:30:22] we have the occasional outstanding woman,
[00:30:25] Anna Komnena,
[00:30:27] Hildegard of Bingen or Rotswita,
[00:30:30] who manages to break through the barriers.
[00:30:32] In Rus, we have neither writing about women nor writing by women.
[00:30:45] You're already familiar with the idea that one of the main causes for this
[00:30:49] is that nearly all our surviving sources were written by monks living in male communities.
[00:30:55] However, this is not just an issue of celibacy as such.
[00:31:00] We have a number of stories of monks or aspiring monks
[00:31:03] undergoing temptations that make it clear that the ascetic life
[00:31:07] is about rejecting family, not just sex.
[00:31:11] In these stories,
[00:31:13] mothers trying to get their sons to live worldly lives in the family home
[00:31:17] are almost as common as would-be wives out to seduce them.
[00:31:22] The women are not necessarily portrayed as evil,
[00:31:25] sometimes they are even sympathetic,
[00:31:28] but they are an obstacle to the spiritual life.
[00:31:33] Despite this ascetic ideal,
[00:31:36] and certainly without suggesting that the average monk
[00:31:39] did not indeed live a life of self-denial,
[00:31:42] the monasteries of Kiev were well on their way to getting rich.
[00:31:47] It was no accident that the rioting citizens of Kiev
[00:31:50] raided them along with the homes of merchants and high officials.
[00:31:56] The rulers of Kiev invested large sums from the tribute they received
[00:32:01] into building monasteries and churches,
[00:32:04] and they were not the only ones.
[00:32:06] The knyazes of other towns also sponsored the building of churches in Kiev and its surrounds.
[00:32:13] In contrast to the initial decades after conversion,
[00:32:16] we see little major religious construction in Chernykhiv,
[00:32:20] Novgorod, or elsewhere.
[00:32:23] Kiev is clearly the ecclesiastical capital.
[00:32:32] The leading monasteries acquired their substantial wealth through donations and legacies.
[00:32:38] The monastery of the caves owned donated land all over Rus.
[00:32:43] Those who did not give land donated precious artifacts
[00:32:47] like gold book bindings or frames for icons,
[00:32:51] food, and other commodities.
[00:32:53] The monastery was recognised as a serious economic player
[00:32:57] and borrowed money from Kievan merchants to commission icons from Constantinople.
[00:33:04] When land was donated, it usually came together with the peasants who worked it,
[00:33:09] sometimes entire villages.
[00:33:13] The monastery enjoyed all the income from working or hunting on this land,
[00:33:18] not just the tithe.
[00:33:19] Not just the tithe.
[00:33:21] With time, the amount of land held by the monasteries will become a serious political issue.
[00:33:31] The development of the monasteries also meant that Rus acquired its own native literary class.
[00:33:38] The chronicles are written by the people of Rus, not by foreign missionaries,
[00:33:42] and they reflect local concerns rather than Byzantine views.
[00:33:48] Outside of the cities, we know even less about life in 12th century Rus.
[00:33:54] Archaeological finds suggest that not much has changed since we discussed agriculture
[00:33:59] back in episode 18.
[00:34:11] The Slavs still mainly farmed in the forest steppe or forest zones.
[00:34:16] They had not moved into the black earth regions of the steppe,
[00:34:19] which were always vulnerable to attack from the Palauopsy.
[00:34:22] Villages consisted of extended family groups that used slash and burn techniques to clear
[00:34:28] land for cultivation, and periodically moved their fields to fresh land to maintain yields.
[00:34:35] Honey and wax were still important products.
[00:34:38] Hunting and fishing were essential to the food supply,
[00:34:41] and berries and mushrooms were foraged in season.
[00:34:46] The technological innovations that will improve ploughing and enable more food
[00:34:51] and enable more productive arable farming are still some centuries into the future.
[00:35:00] In the next episode we are going to jump back in time and look at the origins of the Palauopsy
[00:35:07] or Kipchaks as they called themselves and we will start to refer to them.
[00:35:12] Further on in our story, the Kipchaks will form a significant part of the golden horde,
[00:35:18] and their language will form the basis for the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages.
[00:35:24] Including modern, Karachay, Nogai, Bashkir, Kazakh and Tatar.
[00:35:31] Thank you for listening and until next time, goodbye.