Leaving the Metropolitan's chambers, Alexander immediately encountered the deacon and the gridni. The deacon bowed silently and was already about to step ahead to show the way. Alexander raised a hand.
"I know the way. Thank you."
Deacon Lazar lifted his head as if about to object, but when he met Alexander's gaze and that of the gridni behind him he stopped. Gave a short nod and stepped aside, restoring his composure.
Alexander moved on by himself. Toward the stairs. Down, in the direction of the library.
The conversation with the Metropolitan had given him a clear answer. The Church had not stood beside him and had not stood against him. It would wait and watch, without interfering. Which meant he could rely only on his own decisions and their consequences.
He walked through the cathedral, looking at the faces. At Christ. At the saints.
Here was concentrated a force of faith that had to be reckoned with. It could not be seized at once. It demanded time and deeds. An order that could be seen. Actions that did not diverge from words.
With that thought, Alexander entered the library.
The senior keeper, Ioann, was already there.
He had been preparing for the morning service. The table was still clear no books laid out yet, only what he intended to take with him to the liturgy. But the prince had arrived at the cathedral early, and the Metropolitan had summoned him. Ioann decided at once that the service could wait.
He set aside what he had prepared, went to the shelves, and quickly without fuss gathered what might be needed by the prince today. A few charters, notes, scrolls. Only what was necessary.
By the time Alexander approached, the documents were already on the table.
Ioann bowed calmly.
He was the senior keeper of the library assembled under Yaroslav. The man through whom the memory of princely authority passed - treaties, decisions, words followed by deeds. Under Yaroslav he had seen how power was shaped by writing, and he knew why some words and actions worked while others did not.
For Alexander he was not merely a keeper. He was an old tutor, from the years when his father Yaroslav wanted his son to learn to understand not only the sword, but the word.
Ioann wished to help the young prince now as well - for the sake of the Grand Prince's memory, and for his own. He looked at the laid-out charters, then at Alexander, as if choosing where the prince should begin.
But this time Alexander did not begin by sorting through everything himself.
Yesterday he had sat over the documents alone, until dark, assembling the picture piece by piece. Today, after the conversation with the Metropolitan, he clearly understood that there was too little time. If he continued learning everything on his own, it would take too many days - days he did not have.
And the tutor was here.
Ioann knew these matters not from fragments or guesses. He was the one who could cut the path short. Ioann agreed at once. There was no surprise, no hesitation - rather the sense that he had long been waiting for precisely this moment, when the prince would ask him directly.
They began with the hierarchy of power.
At its core it was similar in all the principalities of Rus': the prince, his court, the druzhina, the boyars, the city, and the Church. What differed was not the principle, but the scale and the balance of forces.
They therefore began with Kyiv - not because a different system operated here, but because here it was the most complex and heavily loaded. From it, the other principalities appeared as more compact and rigid versions of the same model.
Only Kyiv and Novgorod remained truly special cases - each for its own reason.
"The senior authority is the Senior Prince of Kyiv," Ioann began. "But he does not rule alone..."
Alexander raised a hand, stopping him.
"Wait. I am the senior. But if a decision is made by me, it must be carried out, must it not?"
He knew that in other lands he might not be obeyed. Chernihiv, Smolensk, Novgorod, others. Their own princes, their own boyars, their own accounts.
But this was Kyiv. His city. His seat.
And so the thought that a decision could be made and still not work demanded explanation. Alexander looked at Ioann intently and waited.
Ioann was slightly taken aback by the question. Had the young prince not already ruled? Had Grand Prince Yaroslav not entrusted him with a principality? The old man was about to continue his reasoning, but when he saw Alexander incline his head slightly, waiting for an answer, he replied at once.
"You decide," he said. "Otherwise you are not senior."
He paused for a second. The prince listened attentively, without interrupting.
"But authority does not rest on words. It rests on personal authority, the strength of the druzhina, the support of the Church, the consent of the boyars and the city. Without that, a prince remains senior only in title..."
Ioann was about to continue, but at that moment his assistant appeared between the shelves. He stopped and looked questioningly at the senior keeper. There was little time left before the morning service.
Ioann gave a barely perceptible shake of the head. The assistant disappeared as quietly as he had appeared.
Alexander paid no attention. He was already assembling what he had heard into a single structure.
"So I gather a senior council from them. The Metropolitan, the voivode, the senior boyars. We resolve the main matters together. Is that how it works?"
Ioann nodded.
"Correct, Prince. But you have forgotten the thousandman. The head of the city militia. He must also be part of this circle - he is the bridge between the city and the prince."
Alexander nodded and made a note. With the Metropolitan, the voivode, and the thousandman, that made four. The druzhina and the boyars remained.
"And the senior boyars and the druzhina?"
"The druzhina is represented by the voivode," Ioann answered. "And usually two or three senior boyars stand closest to the prince. Under your father there were four."
Alexander immediately made another note and wrote down the number eight. Ioann noticed and continued:
"But not all of them came to council at once."
Alexander raised his head. He did not understand. Had they not just said the prince must consider everyone's opinion?
"Why?"
"The voivode always," Ioann said. "He is the voice of the entire druzhina. The thousandman - if the matter concerns the city: militia, order, trade. The Metropolitan also not always. Only when there are oaths, Church lands, or conflict."
Alexander nodded. It was logical. He crossed out the eight and wrote instead: prince, voivode, two or three boyars. Below that - others as needed, depending on the matter.
After that, Alexander stopped.
He did not set the pen down, only tapped it lightly against the table, thinking. While the prince was silent, Ioann reached for the ladle standing nearby, poured water, took a sip, and only then looked back at Alexander, waiting for the next question.
"And what do I do with those who are not in my circle?"
That question came first. Kyiv was the center of Rus', and there were far more boyars here than in other principalities. Not just ordinary ones - influential ones. There were clearly more than two dozen.
Hearing the question, Ioann considered how to answer.
Not all boyars could enter the inner circle of the Grand Prince. Many held lands, controlled markets, had men, sat on other councils, and if they wished could cut off the prince's air without ever appearing at his table.
He looked away at the shelves, checking that the books were in place. Then looked back at the prince.
"Do not try to gather them all," he said calmly. "That is impossible. And dangerous. Those outside the circle must not feel cast out. But they must not feel favored either."
Alexander frowned.
"Then what are they?"
"Waiting," Ioann replied. "Let each believe that his time has not yet come. And that it may come…"
He continued speaking, describing how Grand Prince Yaroslav had acted, but Alexander was already listening only halfway. In his mind another, more effective method was taking shape.
A council had limits. You could not seat everyone at one table.
Which meant control had to be kept elsewhere. If a boyar could not be bound by a place at the table, he had to be bound by work. Not by words. Not by promises. By something he himself would not want to abandon.
Construction. Trade. Crafts. Money that passed through the princely court.
Above them the morning bell struck dully. The sound passed through the stone, echoed in the walls. Ioann turned his head toward the ringing, paused, as if checking the time.
Alexander did not look away.
Such a man might be dissatisfied. Might grumble, feel undervalued, wait for a chance to betray. But in that case to go against the prince would mean cutting into his own business.
This was a path on which one could not rule half-heartedly, and where everything had to be built anew. But there was no other. The old order worked too poorly. The new one bound so tightly that resistance became not dangerous - but unprofitable.
Alexander made a brief note.
Not everyone at the table. The rest - into work.
After Kyiv, they moved on to the other principalities of Rus'.
With them it was simpler. Power there was built along the same lines. The same offices, the same functions - only without Kyiv's scale. Instead of a Senior Prince, simply a prince. Instead of a metropolitan, a bishop.
Authority there was more compact: fewer people, greater personal weight of the prince. Decisions were made faster, and mistakes were punished more harshly. The boyars had less room to maneuver.
When they reached Novgorod, Ioann did not call it a principality. He called it simply the Novgorod land.
Alexander noticed at once. He frowned. Novgorod was part of Rus'. There was a prince there. Why, then, not a principality like the others?
Ioann explained without haste.
Novgorod differed not in names or offices, but in the direction of power.
Formally, the same figures existed there: prince, boyars, posadnik, thousandman, bishop. But while in Kyiv and other lands power flowed from the prince to the city, in Novgorod it flowed from the city to the prince.
Ioann coughed lightly, took a sip of water, and offered a brief apology before continuing. Age was taking its toll, and he kept up the pace of the conversation with effort.
The prince there did not sit on the seat as master of the land. He was invited by contract, as a military and judicial head. He did not control city revenues, did not appoint posadniks, and did not own land by his own will.
Even under Grand Prince Yaroslav, who held Novgorod more tightly than the others, authority was built not on direct subordination, but on alliance with the city's elite. Over time, this feature only strengthened.
Novgorod was not an exception to the overall system of Rus'.It was its inversion.
Alexander nodded and began to write.
With the other lands, one could work through the familiar order. With Novgorod - no. It required a different calculation, a different measure of pressure, and a different form of agreement.
He circled the notes several times, marking it as a particularly important and dangerous place. Novgorod would have to be dealt with separately. And far more cautiously than the others.
After finishing with the hierarchy, they moved on to the next matter. How boyars swore allegiance to the prince. Whether they gave oaths, and in what form.
Ioann began to speak of the ryad of loyalty.
Alexander remembered the custom. The ryad had been brought to him before, but not in Kyiv. Not at the center of all power in Rus'. Then it had been only a few trusted boyars, bound to him personally.
Now everything was different.
This time, the ryad of loyalty was to be given not by a handful, but by the boyars of the Kyiv land - those who held land, were bound to Kyiv by economy and people. The large and middle clans, the senior men of the city. All the lesser ones took the ryad through their seniors.
This was important: Kyiv was not merely a seat, but the place where authority converged.
Boyars from other principalities would not give him a ryad of loyalty. They would show respect, confirm previous agreements, demonstrate that they still reckoned with Kyiv - but no more.
Alexander understood this.
Authority rested not on subordination, but on land, contract, and force. No one was obliged to give him a ryad unless he stood under his hand. Those boyars answered either to their own princes, or to their own strength and arrangements.
This was not disobedience.It was order.
They then went over other basic matters a prince needed to know. Ioann spoke calmly and methodically, moving from one thing to the next. He assumed the young prince would need more than one day to settle all of this in his mind and bind it together.
But Alexander grasped quickly.
At times he asked simple questions - ones even the young knew and understood. And at times questions that Ioann found difficult to answer at once.
During this time, others entered the library more than once.
Voivode Stanislav came, and with him Ignat, the voivode of Pereyaslavl. Ignat wished to know when the prince would be able to receive him in audience. He could not remain long in Kyiv: after the death of the princes, the threat from external enemies had increased, and leaving Pereyaslavl without oversight was dangerous.
As the right hand of the fallen Prince Vsevolod, he sought as quickly as possible to secure Kyiv's support.
Alexander agreed and told the voivodes that at dawn the following day there would be a council. He instructed Stanislav to summon all the senior boyars of Kyiv - those who had sat on the council under his father and brother.
The voivodes nodded and left.
Alexander and Ioann remained seated until midday, missing yet another service. By then, the prince decided that it was enough for today. There was too much information; it needed to be digested, and preparation was required for the council the next day.
Back in his chambers, Alexander took the parchment he had brought from the library and began to write out his plans. He wrote not in the familiar tongue, but in words and signs no one here knew or could read.
He had no intention of relying on memory. There was too much to hold at once. And leaving readable notes meant opening his hand himself to anyone who might come after.
The plan required fixation.Step by step.
The first thing to be done already tomorrow - was to gather the senior boyars of Kyiv together with the metropolitan and accept the ryad of loyalty from the Kyiv boyars.
This was the key point.
By the logic of things, all of them were expected to give the ryad. Refusal meant standing alone under the hand of the prince, with the metropolitan's support and with the ryad already given by the rest of the boyars around him.
In such a position, a man became a convenient target - not for an immediate strike, but for slow pressure. Land, income, influence all of it could be taken away piece by piece, by the hands of those very boyars who now stood beside the prince.
For that reason, Alexander considered open refusal unlikely.
Still, he marked it.
He set the stylus aside for a moment and ran his fingers over the bridge of his nose. The next steps were already lining up in his head, but the tension did not let go.
He forced himself back to the line.
Whoever refused the ryad would reveal himself at once. He held his gaze on that line longer than on the others. Giving the ryad cost nothing - unless a man consciously chose to remain outside the circle of the senior prince. And that meant every refusal was not doubt, but a decision.
As the second point, Alexander marked the arriving boyars.
He understood that all of Rus' would not immediately submit to him or respect him as they had respected his father. Authority did not come by right of the seat alone. First, an anchor had to be created.
He wrote down all the principalities of Rus' in a column.
First was Kyiv. Opposite it, he placed a mark. Here there was no doubt - he was the senior prince, and support would follow.
Next came Pereyaslavl and Chernihiv.
Pereyaslavl stood on the steppe frontier. His brother Vsevolod had died there. The people of that land were the first to feel approaching danger. They would come to the prince of Kyiv willingly and cling to him, simply because without Kyiv's help they would not stand if the steppe moved again. This could and should - be used to bind Pereyaslavl more tightly.
Chernihiv was different.
It was stronger than Pereyaslavl and stood apart. Its lands were not pressed as hard, and there was no direct need for Kyiv's protection. They needed less - and so expected less from him.
Alexander held the stylus still.
"With Chernihiv, it won't be that simple. A different move will be needed."
He noted it without a conclusion, leaving the line empty.
At the Smolensk principality, he frowned. He did not yet know what to expect from them and decided not to touch it for now. Such lands would come on their own; a principality without a prince's backing was always vulnerable to its neighbors. The question was only one of time.
Then his gaze fell on the line: the Polotsk principality.
Here everything was clearer. His cousin, Vseslav Brianchislavich, ruled there - an adult, long and firmly seated in his place. Trying to interfere would be pointless. He could gain nothing there, and impose nothing either.
Better to leave things as they were. Formal respect. Maintenance of relations. No more.
Alexander made a note and moved on.
Next came lands without princes: the Turov-Pinsk land, Volodymyr-Volhynia, and Galicia, which had not yet even formed as a principality - there were cities there, but no seat of its own.
He remembered well how this had looked in practice under his father.
Yaroslav could not hold everything through dynastic princes - there were many principalities, and fewer sons. He secured what mattered most: the key seats were occupied. The western lands remained secondary, but important.
Volodymyr-Volhynia had been given to Alexander by his father; formally it was his. But he had barely involved himself in its governance he did not sit in councils, did not delve into disputes. Campaigns, travel, hunts, skirmishes with bandits - that had been his life. Everything else was handled by a governor appointed by his father.
The same was true of the Turov-Pinsk land and the future Galicia. Instead of princes, governors ruled there on Kyiv's behalf - local senior boyars relying on princely support.
Volodymyr-Volhynia and Turov-Pinsk lay close to Kyiv and therefore depended on it more strongly. The absence of a prince made them vulnerable, and without support from the center their authority quickly wavered.
Galicia was different.
Although a governor sat there as well, Kyiv held that land weakly. Formally it was part of Rus', but in practice it lived apart. The boyars there were rich, strong, and independent. And too far from Kyiv.
Opposite Galicia, Alexander drew a dash.
Too far. Too loosely bound. Nothing to press with.
But with Volodymyr-Volhynia and Turov-Pinsk, one could work. Confirm the governors. Give them support, and they would continue to rule in Kyiv's name. And if someone failed to appear or began to evade - make his rival the governor instead.
There were plenty willing to take those places.
Last on the list were the distant lands.
The Rostov-Suzdal principality lay far away. His nephew, Rostislav Vladimirovich, ruled there. As with his cousin Vseslav in Polotsk, there was nothing to be done. The best decision was simple: maintain relations and do not interfere.
Tmutarakan he marked without hesitation. Too far. Too detached. He saw no sense in spending strength on that land. The benefit was less than the cost. Whoever needed to deal with it would do so without him.
That left Novgorod. A special case.
Ioann had spoken of it at length. And Alexander himself had read enough. A city of trade and veche. They did not sever ties without cause. His father's authority still lingered, and therefore Novgorod would most likely avoid an open break.
They would send an envoy. Speak of returning customs, old agreements, habitual order. Ask and bargain. What was needed here was compromise - not yielding everything, but not breaking it over the knee either. So that it would be profitable for both them and him.
Summing up, Alexander noted: real support could be obtained from only four principalities out of eleven.
He held his gaze on the number, then ran a finger along the line and nodded. Four was little by the scale of all Rus'. But for a beginning, it was enough. His father had begun with less. Then he had only Novgorod.
The problem lay elsewhere. These four existed only in his ink for now. Respect and force still had to be made real. Secured. Made to work.
Rus' was vast. And for the first time, he truly considered how his father had held it in balance. Yaroslav ruled through people in such a way that all eleven principalities respected him.
That could not be repeated at once.
Alexander carefully rolled the parchment and set it aside.
But one could begin.