The Galician catastrophe of the Igorovychs
(1209 – 1211)

Nicholas Zharkikh

Shortened text of the section. Full text in ukrainian version.

I wanted to start another chapter of our story with words la comedia continuata, but here we will have to talk about a tragedy, and one from which a talented author could create a new "Macbeth"…

This is what this catastrophe looks like on the pages of the Romanovychs’ Chronicle, and only the last episode has independent confirmation in the "Chronicle of Yury Vsevolodovich". In the entire previous history of the whole of Eastern Europe, we do not have such a scale of violence that can be called a civil war. Even if the chronicler exaggerated and in fact not 500 boyars were killed, but 50 or even 15 – in this case, we will not see anything similar later until the oprichnina of Tsar Ivan the Terrible.