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Jurij Dolgorukij was the second-youngest son of Volodimer Monomax, and though he is more well known today than the majority of figures in these pages, in the early twelfth century he was still a young man in the shadow of his oldest brother M′stislav. While M′stislav had an arranged dynastic marriage with a Swedish princess, Jurij was married to the daughter of a Polovcian ruler. On the Rusian scale of dynastic marriages, it was a much less grand achievement.
Jurij’s marriage took place at the same time as the marriage of Svjatoslav Ol′govič discussed above. Their fathers, Volodimer Monomax and Oleg Svjatoslavič, had ridden forth, along with Oleg’s brother Davyd, to make peace with the Polovcians, who had been causing havoc in the Rusian lands. [12] To arrange a peace agreement, Volodimer married his son Jurij to the daughter of Khan Aepa, son of Osen. [13] The primary purpose of the marriages seems to have been to make peace between these groups of Volodimeriči and Polovcians, but it does not seem to have had lasting success. Because of the complete absence of Polovcian sources and the Rusian choniclers’ preference for leaving out women, nothing is known of Jurij’s bride. In fact, it is only because of the Monomaxoviči emphasis of the extant chronicles that we know the name of Monomax’s son, Jurij, who married the steppe princess. The same sentence describes the marriage to another steppe princess of a son of Oleg, who is not mentioned by name. [14]
Baumgarten mentions a possible second wife for Jurij, a woman “vraisemblement Byzantine d’origine,” citing Karamzin. [15] While it is possible to explain this simply as another attempt to add to the Byzantine connections of venerable Rusians, it is likely that there was another wife, whoever she might have been. The evidence comes to us from several sources, including four different chronicles—Hypatian, Tver, Nikon, and Voskresenskij—which all record Andrej Bogoliubskij Jurevič’s exile of his brothers M’stislav, Vasil’ko, and Vsevolod with their mother with their mother and their respective children to Byzantium. [16] A Byzantine source, John Kinnamos, also records that land was given along the Danube to Vasil´ko Jurevič, after he was exiled from Rus´. [17] While it is likely that this combination of sources is where Karamzin and Baumgarten each derived their origin for the the second wife, there is no positive evidence to substantiate this, and it seems quite likely that had Jurij married a Byzantine woman, the union would have been recorded by at least one of the preserved sources. Apart from her origin, however, the fact that Andrej Jurevič was attempting to remove a certain subset of his brothers from Rus´, along with their mother, indicates that this was probably not Andrej’s mother as well, and thus a second marriage, or at least relationship, for Jurij must be postulated, though there is almost no other information about it, or her.