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Among
the Slavs' earliest settlements was that of the name of Kyiv
along the Dnipro River. The state known as Kyivan Rus-Ukraine
arose in late 9th century. The Kyivan Rus-Ukraine reached
its zenith in the 10th and 11th centuries under the rulers
Volodymyr I (St. Vladimir) and his son Yaroslav I (Yaroslav
the Wise). Volodymyr adopted Christianity as the official
religion of his realm about AD 888.
Christianity
gave the eastern Slavic peoples their first written language,
called Church Slavonic and Kyiv became eastern Europe's chief
political and cultural centre. The 12th and 13th centuries
saw the decline of Kyiv owing to internal dissension, struggles
with the invading nomads. The Mongol conquest in the mid-13th
century decisively ended Kyivan power, but a Ukrainian principality
in western Ukraine that had emerged about 1200 continued into
the 14th century.
In
the 14th century Lithuania annexed most Ukrainian lands except
for the Galician principality, which passed to the kingdom
of Poland; and in the meantime southern Ukraine remained under
the control of the Tartars. After the Union of Lublin in 1569,
rule over Ukraine was transferred from Lithuania to Poland.
Religious dissent and social strife between the Ukrainians
and their Polish overlords were augmented by the Zaporozhian
Cossacks, who were in fact a class of free warriors. From
their stronghold along the lower Dnipro River, the Cossacks
in 1648, led by their | 
