c. 1201–c. 1264
Danylo of Halych
First king of Rus’
He lost his father and became a refugee at four, and half a century later he received the crown of the King of Rus’ from the pope. Danylo of Halych spent thirty years winning back his father’s state and kept it alive between the Horde and Europe.
Key accomplishments
- Unified Volhynia (by 1229) and Galicia (1238), restoring his father’s Galician-Volhynian state
- Victory at the Battle of Yaroslav (1245) over a coalition of rivals, boyars and their Hungarian and Polish allies
- Accepted a royal crown from Pope Innocent IV in Dorohychyn (1253)
- Built new fortresses and towns, including Kholm (his new capital) and Kremenets
- Reformed the army, creating an infantry drawn from the peasantry
A prince on the run
Danylo was the elder son of Prince Roman Mstyslavych, who first united Galicia and Volhynia. When his father was killed in 1205, Danylo was about four. The boyars rose up, the neighbors moved in, and the little prince had to flee with his mother and his brother Vasylko: first to the Hungarian court, then to small Volhynian appanages.
Thirty years for his father’s inheritance
Danylo started with Volhynia: by the end of the 1220s he and his brother had united its lands. Halych took longer. He won it only in 1238, when the townspeople backed him. In 1240 the Mongols took Kyiv, then held for Danylo by his voivode Dmytro, and destroyed the main cities of Rus’. Yet in 1245, at Yaroslav, Danylo defeated a coalition of the Chernihiv prince Rostyslav, rebellious boyars and their Hungarian and Polish allies. Galicia was finally his.
A crown from Rome
To keep his state alive, in 1246 Danylo went to the Horde and accepted the khan’s overlordship. At the same time he prepared to resist: he built the fortresses of Kholm and Kremenets, moved his capital to Kholm, created an infantry of peasants and looked for allies in the West. In 1253, in Dorohychyn, a papal envoy handed him a crown and scepter from Pope Innocent IV, and Danylo became the first king of Rus’. The promised crusade against the Horde never came, and in 1260 the Mongol commander Burundai forced him to tear down the walls of many towns. Danylo died in 1264 in Kholm and was buried in its cathedral.
Why it matters today
After the fall of Kyiv, Danylo kept a Rus’ state alive in the west and tied it to Europe. And Lviv, founded in his time, became one of Ukraine’s main cities.
