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Group: Delaware Bay, Lower Counties on the (English Colony)
People: Johann Friedrich Struensee
Topic: Rus'-Byzantine War of 1043
Location: Taranto > Tarentum Puglia Italy

Rus'-Byzantine War of 1043

Years: 1043 - 1043

The final Rus'-Byzantine War is, in essence, an unsuccessful naval raid against Constantinople instigated by Yaroslav I of Kiev and led by his eldest son, Vladimir of Novgorod, in 1043.The reasons for the war are disputed, as is its course.

Michael Psellus, an eyewitness of the battle, leaves a hyperbolic account detailing how the invading Kievan Rus' were annihilated by a superior imperial fleet with Greek fire off the Anatolian shore.

According to the Slavonic chronicles, the Kievan fleet was destroyed by a tempest.The Byzantines send a squadron of 14 ships to pursue the dispersed monoxylae of the Rus'.

They are sunk by the Kievan admiral Ivan Tvorimich, who also manages to rescue Prince Vladimir after the shipwreck.

A 6,000-strong Kievan contingent under Vyshata, which does not take part in naval action, is captured and deported to Constantinople.

Eight hundred of the Rus' prisoners are blinded.Vyshata will be allowed to return to Kiev at the conclusion of the peace treaty three years later.

Under the terms of the peace settlement, Yaroslav's son Vsevolod I is to marry a daughter of Emperor Constantine Monomachus.

Vsevolod's son by this princess will assume his maternal grandfather's name and become known as Vladimir Monomakh.

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress."

― H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, Vol 2 (1920)