Principality of Kiev

The inner Principality of Kiev was the medieval principality centred on the city of Kiev, formed in the political fragmentation of the Kievan Rus' in the early twelfth century. The clan had held the state together under the senior prince on the grand throne, but rivalry broke it: after Mstislav I died in 1132 the semi-autonomous lands became independent in fact, and the effective rule of Kiev shrank to the central regions around its capital, a reduced domain known as the inner principality. Kiev stayed the spiritual centre, with the Metropolitan of the Eastern Orthodox Church, even as its political weight fell; between 1150 and 1180 many of its towns, Vyshhorod, Kaniv and Belgorod among them, broke away as principalities of their own, and Vladimir-Suzdal and Galicia-Volhynia rose. The Mongol invasion ruined it and put it under the suzerainty of Alexander Nevsky's Vladimir-Suzdal. After the Battle of Irpen in 1321 Lithuania coveted the city, took it in 1362, and ruled through the Olshanski and Olelkovichi princes, while the principality formally lived on until it was turned into the Kiev Voivodeship in 1471.