Ruthenia

For other uses, see Ruthenia (disambiguation).

Rus' land/Ruthenia in yellow, Kievan Rus' under Oleg the Wise in gray, 862-912

Ruthenia[a] is an exonym, originally used in Medieval Latin, as one of several terms for Kievan Rus'.[1] Originally, the term Rus' land referred to a triangular area, which mainly corresponds to the tribe of Polans in Dnieper Ukraine.[2] Ruthenia was used to refer to the East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox people of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austria-Hungary, mainly to Ukrainians and sometimes Belarusians, corresponding to the territories of modern Belarus, Ukraine, Eastern Poland and some of western Russia.[3][4][5][6]

Historically, in a broader sense, the term was used to refer to all the territories under Kievan dominion (mostly East Slavs).[7][8]

The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (1772–1918), corresponding to parts of Western Ukraine, was referred to as Ruthenia and its people as Ruthenians.[5] As a result of a Ukrainian national identity gradually dominating over much of present-day Ukraine in the 19th and 20th centuries, the endonym Rusyn is now mostly used among a minority of peoples on the territory of the Carpathian Mountains, including Carpathian Ruthenia.[9]


Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).

  1. ^ Mägi, Marika (2018). In Austrvegr: the role of the Eastern Baltic in Viking Age communication across the Baltic Sea. Leiden: Brill. p. 166. ISBN 9789004363816.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Gasparov, Boris; Raevsky-Hughes, Olga (July 2021). California Slavic Studies, Volume XVI: Slavic Culture in the Middle Ages. Univ of California Press. p. 198. ISBN 978-0-520-30918-0.
  4. ^ Nazarenko, Aleksandr Vasilevich (2001). "1. Имя "Русь" в древнейшей западноевропейской языковой традиции (XI-XII века)" [The name Rus' in the old tradition of Western European language (XI-XII centuries)]. Древняя Русь на международных путях: междисциплинарные очерки культурных, торговых, политических связей IX-XII веков [Old Rus' on international routes: Interdisciplinary Essays on cultural, trade, and political ties in the 9th-12th centuries] (DJVU) (in Russian). Languages of the Rus' culture. pp. 40, 42–45, 49–50. ISBN 978-5-7859-0085-1. Archived from the original on 14 August 2011.
  5. ^ a b Magocsi, Paul R. (2010). A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples. University of Toronto Press. p. 73. ISBN 978-1-4426-1021-7. Retrieved 14 February 2017. Besides the Greco-Byzantine term Rosia to describe Rus', Latin documents used several related terms – Ruscia, Russia, Ruzzia – for Kievan Rus' as a whole. Subsequently, the terms Ruteni and Rutheni were used to describe Ukrainian and Belarusan Eastern Christians (especially members of the Uniate, later Greek Catholic, Church) residing in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The German, French, and English versions of those terms – Ruthenen, Ruthène, Ruthenian – generally were applied only to the inhabitants of Austrian Galicia and Bukovina of Hungarian Transcarpathia.
  6. ^ Handbook of language and ethnic identity. Vol. 2: The success-failure continuum in language and ethnic identity efforts, volume 2. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 2011. p. 384. ISBN 978-0195392456.
  7. ^ Dyczok, Marta (2000). Ukraine: movement without change, change without movement. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publ. p. 23. ISBN 9789058230263.
  8. ^ The later middle ages (Fifth ed.). North York, Ontario, Canada Tonawanda, New York Plymouth: University of Toronto Press. 2016. p. 699. ISBN 978-1442634374.
  9. ^ Magocsi, Paul Robert (2015). With their backs to the mountains: a history of Carpathian Rus' and Carpatho-Rusyns. Budapest: Central European University Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-6155053399.