Kyiv

Lithuanian rule became firm after the Battle of Blue Waters in 1362, when Algirdas took Kyiv into his grand duchy and set his son Volodymyr on its throne. For another century the city kept princes of its own, until Casimir IV abolished the principality in 1470 and handed Kyiv to royal governors. Twelve years later the Crimean Tatars sacked and burned much of it, and for more than a century the old capital of Rus' lay in decline. Its revival in the early 17th century came through the Orthodox Church: the Monastery of the Caves became the centre of a cultural awakening, and the brotherhood school that grew into the Mohyla Collegium trained a new generation of clergy. When Bohdan Khmelnytsky rode into Kyiv with his victorious Cossacks in 1649, those clergy hailed him as defender of the Orthodox faith. Russian troops arrived after the Pereyaslav treaty of 1654, and in 1667 the Truce of Andrusovo made Kyiv part of the Tsardom of Russia.