Severian

The Severians were an East Slavic tribal confederation of the lower Desna and Seym, stronghold Chernihiv, the black city of the forests. They paid squirrel and beaver tribute to Khazars until Oleg of Novgorod brought them into Kievan Rus' around 884; they joined the 907 campaign against Constantinople. Absorbed into Chernigov principality, the tribe vanishes from chronicles after 1024, but its name lived on in Severia, land of timber fortresses.

Its best-known appanage was Novgorod-Seversk, whose Prince Igor led the ill-fated 1185 campaign against the Cumans told in The Tale of Igor's Campaign. The Mongol storms of the thirteenth century were followed by Lithuanian rule, until the Muscovite-Lithuanian war of 1500 to 1503 gave Chernihiv and other towns to Ivan III.

Severia was the first region to rally to the False Dmitry in 1604, passed to the Polish Crown under the Deulino truce of 1618 and returned to Muscovy under the Andrusovo truce of 1667, its southern reaches guarded by Cossacks and fortified lines; from the sixteenth century workshops developed a Severian icon-painting school.