Church Statute of Prince Yaroslav

The Church Statute of Prince Yaroslav is a source of church law in Kievan Rus. It was a short legal code that defined the authority of the church in relation to the prince and his administration and regulated relations between church and state. It marked the boundary between church and princely courts, listed the persons who fell under church jurisdiction, set rules of family law, which belonged to the church, and prescribed sanctions for moral violations. Written between the eleventh and twelfth centuries and reworked in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic, it drew on Byzantine law, including the Nomocanon, and widened church jurisdiction compared with the earlier Church Statute of Prince Vladimir.