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Russkaya Pravda

Medieval and Early Modern Constitutional Charters

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Russkaya Pravda was the legal code of Kievan Rus' and its successor principalities, built on the eleventh-century Pravda of Yaroslav and repeatedly revised and expanded over the following centuries as the main source of law across the region. Despite close cultural and commercial ties between Kievan Rus' and Byzantium, the code's punitive approach, which lacked capital and corporal punishment, resembled Norse legal tradition rather than Byzantine law. It survives in three versions, the Short, Extensive, and Abridged Editions, ranging from roughly 850 words to about four times that length, was rediscovered by historian Vasily Tatishchev in a Novgorod chronicle manuscript in 1738, and was eventually superseded by Ivan III's Sudebnik of 1497 as Muscovy unified Russian law.

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