ACCORDING TO THE description of the world and its peoples in the Primary Chronicle compiled in Kiev in the early 1100s, when the sons of Noah divided the world among themselves after the flood, the Orient fell to the lot of Shem, the South to the lot of Ham, and Japheth received “northern and western lands.” The people of Rus belong to the race of Japheth, and they live in his lot along with other peoples, such as the Swedes, Normans, Angles, Romans, Germans, and Franks. “Rus” is the name used in this book for the medieval polity located in present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Russia; in Anglophone scholarship, it is also known as Kievan Rus, medieval Russia, and medieval Ukraine.

For a twelfth-century Kievan monk, it appears self-evident that his country belongs to the cultural sphere of the Angles, Romans, Germans, and Franks. To use modern terms, the Primary Chronicle describes Rus as part of medieval European civilization. Most modern scholars would not agree. William Chester Jordan expressed a widely accepted opinion when he stated that medieval “Europe was where Latin Christians— Roman Catholic Christians— dominated the political and demographic landscape. A profound divide […] separated Catholics from Greek or Orthodox Christians.” In scholarly literature, Rus has been traditionally presented as part of a “Byzantine Commonwealth,” an area dominated by Greek Orthodox Christianity and separate from Latin Europe. Alternatively, some scholars have argued that Rus, a huge polity the size of Charlemagne's empire, was not so much a Byzantine satellite as a world in itself: neither Europe nor Asia, neither East nor West. According to this school of thought, the reception of Christianity from Constantinople isolated Rus from Latin Christendom, but did not create strong ties with Byzantium, which was too distant geographically and too different culturally to become a formative influence. Thus Rus, separated from Byzantium by its geographic location and separated from neighbouring Poland, Hungary, and Scandinavia by its different form of Christianity, followed its own unique path of development. This “unique path” is often invoked to explain the apparent inability of modern Russia, which traces its origins to Rus, to adopt Western institutions and to integrate itself into Europe.