The period between the deaths of Vladimir I (St. Vladimir) and Vladimir Monomakh may be considered politically as one of expansion and consolidation for Kiev and the southern Rusˈ lands. At the end of Monomakh's reign the Riurikids were the exclusive rulers of a realm that stretched from Galicia and Volynia in the southwest to Rostov and Murom in the northeast, from Pereiaslavlˈ and Kiev in the south to Novgorod with its own empire reaching the White Sea and the Ural Mountains in the north. With commercial links to Byzantium, the Muslim East, and Europe, Kievan Rusˈ was a flourishing, powerful state. Its major towns, such as Kiev, Chernigov, and Novgorod, had been transformed into bustling metropoles, inhabited by tens of thousands of people, adorned with stone churches, and protected by strong fortifications; its outposts were becoming centers of dynamic principalities. The dynastic and territorial organization of Kievan Rusˈ had evolved into what appeared to be relatively stable and effective forms. Kiev, the main political, commercial, and cultural center, continued to be the seat of the senior Riurikid. Members of each branch of the dynasty, as agreed at Liubech in 1097, settled around their own secondary centers, which were transformed into their hereditary principalities.

Within this framework Monomakh and his sons ruled to 1139. But during the next century, preceding the Mongol invasion of 1237–40, political conditions in Kievan Rusˈ became increasingly complex. The multiplication of dynastic lines, untimely deaths of individual princes, and intradynastic marriages obscured the lines separating dynastic generations and branches and determining the order of Kievan succession.