Grand Princess Olga ruled Kyivan Rus as regent for her son Sviatoslav during a time when outsiders actively sought to control the rapidly expanding trade-rich kingdom. She effectively used her armies and battle-maiden acumen to defend the realm against rebelling tribes, the Byzantine emperor and the nomadic Pechenegs, giving her son a state significantly stronger than the one she was unexpectedly charged with decades earlier. And near the end of her reign, Olga converted to Christianity, the first member of the Riurikid Dynasty to do so, thus encouraging the religion’s spread among the pagan Slavs, Finns and Scandinavians of the realm. And for this, Olga was sainted in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the first of a long line of Riurikid warrior saints that gave the state and its princes a growing line of pious warmongering role models to follow as they governed northern Eurasia for 700 years. It is difficult to exaggerate Olga’s importance to the history of Eastern Europe.
The role of the dynasty
Little is known about Olga’s early life except that her father was an important Scandinavian from Pskov (on the modern Estonian-Russian border) and, in 903, she was brought to Kyiv to meet and marry her future husband, Igor. He was the son of the Viking Riurik who, according to the fantastic tale in The Tale of Bygone Years, accepted an invitation proffered by a confederation of Slavic and Finnic tribes “to come and rule over them.”
Igor (912-945) spent his reign subjugating the tribes along the major river systems. Once conquered,
