August 27, 2019 • 36 mins
When the rebellious Drevlian tribe killed Princess Olga of Kiev's husband, Igor, she set forth on one of history's bloodiest revenge's schemes, instigating not one but multiple unsaintly, violent massacres. Join the guys as they explore Olga's brutal rise to power -- and how she ultimately became a saint.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show Ridiculous Historians, friends and neighbors. Thank you
as always for joining us. We always like to say
nice things about our super producer, Casey Pegram, and we
do mean these sincerely. But we have a special announcement today,
one that blew my mind. Actually, another another thing to
(00:51):
add to the long legend of Casey Shadow here. This
guy came in to record today's episode on his actual birthday.
It's true, I'm here and it is my birthday. What
a guy. My name is No, are you still been
your Ben? Right? I am several times over Ben Bulan, Yes,
(01:11):
And this is the first time that we have that
the three of us have been in the studio together
in a little while. Shouts out also to Christopher Haciotis
for pinch hitting there. I checked out that episode. That
was pretty cool man, Thanks man, I enjoyed it. Christopher
is a real mention for pinch hitting while you are
off on adventures. And I alluded a little bit to
(01:32):
your adventures, but I didn't want to spill the tea
as it were, as the kids would say, and what
what what what were you doing? Ben? I was doing
all sorts of non sketchy things. I traveled to I
traveled to Japan, to a couple of different towns in Japan.
One was Nagoya, one was Tokyo, and I was able
(01:53):
to make it back. I have a couple of cool
stories about it, but they maybe maybe store as for
another day, or if we want to knock off early
this afternoon, maybe we can grab a beer and regale
each other. Because I gotta tell you, man, I'm coming
in hot. My body doesn't know what time it is.
My body has a vague spider sense about what day
(02:15):
it is. So luckily this is our favorite history show,
so we don't have to talk about today. And I
don't think we have to talk about specific times on
the clock. But we do have to talk about badasses.
We absolutely do. Ben, How do you like your saints?
I like my murderous I like my saints the way
(02:37):
I like my superheroes. So saints often, at least in Catholicism,
are patrons of one thing or another. So I like
very specific patronages for saints. And I also, like I'm
gonna tell you, I like some Song of Ice and Fires,
some Game of Thrones, e historical gore when it comes
to saints. Well, I'm gonna drop a couple of perlatives here,
(03:00):
and I want you folks out in podcast land to
use your imagination picture what kind of individual might be
attached to these. The Missionary to Ukraine. Okay, that doesn't
sound so exciting. How about the Vikings Saint Queen of
Russia or my personal favorite, the Scourge of the Drevelans,
also known as equal to the Apostles. These are all
(03:22):
titles held by Princess Olga of Kiev, now Sat Olga
of Kiev, and I love that. I love that string
of honorifics too. It's very denerous, Targarian. It's very uh
for the nerds in the crowd, it's very Vigo of Carpathia.
It's very Zena princess warrior or your princess uh Zeno
(03:43):
warrior princess. And just to be clear, that's Vigo v
Carpathian Vego wife. Do you exactly? Oh, you know what?
It bears up on a rewatch. So, st Olga, unlike Vigo,
is a real person, and she was born in a
(04:06):
city in what is today northwestern Russia close to the
Estonian border. The city's name is gonna be a great
fodder for all of us on ridiculous historians. It is
spelled p s k o V. So what do you
think piscoscov discove? Yeah, I don't know. We're probably gonna
(04:26):
have a lot of fun with a lot of these
pronunciations in today this episode. There any uh people with
Estonian heritage out there, please feel free to write in
and and shred us new ones for our pronunciation. We
will do our level best. What do you think should
we go with scove silent p like the it's for
that for only for the reason that it's it's more
fun in my mouth. You know what Visco girls are been?
(04:48):
What are Visco girls? Diisco girls? It's a sort of
a meme thing. My ten year old told me about it.
They are sort of basic, you know, quote unquote. So
they have a particular garb and it's scrunches around their wrists,
short shorts, clean white van slip ons um, some sort
of long baggy T shirt and they always have a
water bottle with bright colored stickers on it that is
(05:09):
the brand hydro flask. And they laugh like this. I
think you told me about this at some point. So
Piscoff kind of sounds like the way this goo girls
laugh is what I'm getting at. There we go, There
we go. And their name is probably based on the
storied history of this of this area. It's gonna be
based on that plug in, right, it's an app. It's
(05:31):
a photo editing app for Instagram. Casey on the case.
Let's let's go back to those names. Viking sat queen,
missionary to Ukraine, equal to the Apostles of Dragons, mother
of Dragon's breakroup change, scourge of the Drevelans. The thing
about Princess Olga is that she earned all of these titles,
(05:52):
and today's story is about how she got there, about
how she went from being a princess, and being a
princess is a problematic, beautiful thing. You know, a lot
of people love the stories of royalty, but unfortunately many,
many princes and princesses end up being historical footnotes. Why
(06:13):
is Olga difference right, Because you think of a princess,
you think of a fair maiden, helpless and defenseless, being
kept somewhere in a tower, you know, relegated to her
room behind lock and key. Uh, this was not the
case for Olga. In nine twelve she married a man
by the name of Igor. Igor they say, you know
that for a fact, because you've got Russian pals. And
(06:34):
Igor was the heir to the throne of Kiev. And
he tell us a little bit about the geography of Kiev.
Luckily I can uh Kiev now a city in Ukraine.
It's part of something we call the Kievan rules are
us apostrophe. Uh Kievan Russ was a federation of Finnish
(06:57):
and East Slavic people in Europe from let's say, around
the ninth century to somewhere in the century. But this
this name was a retronym. It was not called Kevin
Russ at the time. This is a name that we
we sort of made up later as a species. And
when we say a loose federation, um, we have to
(07:22):
be very mindful to realize that this this is a
somewhat common thing historically in a lot of places. Just
the problem of communication makes it difficult for a large, uniform,
uh lockdown empire to exist. And wouldn't this have been
sort of almost something bordering on tribal kind of like
you had chieftains rather than elected officials. Sure, yeah, yeah,
(07:47):
So we see the traces of Russ in the modern
day because nations like Ukraine, Russia and Belarus all sort
of claim Kievan as their their cultural d n A.
You know, obviously bellar ARUs, Russia have the name Russ
(08:07):
in their own country's name. Uh. The name Kievan Ruce
comes to us around somewhere in like the eighteen hundred's,
nineteenth century or so, but as the same meaning as
the land of the Russ, which is how it was
called in the Middle Ages and during Olga's time. The
first stories about the russ from the time that people
(08:29):
historically arrived in this region is told in the Primary Chronicle,
which is also known as the Tale of Bygone Years,
the Russian Primary Chronicle, and this is where we get
a lot of the information about Princess Olga and her hubs.
Igor himself, It's right, Igor was a Viking descendant. His father,
a man by the name of Ruric, was a chieftain.
(08:52):
Like we said, this was a very kind of tribal society.
Um and his people were called the Varangians. I don't
know about that pronunciation. What do you think it reminds
me of the Farangis from star Trek a little bit
um but or the variags. They were also called v
a r y a g s varyags, varyags. There we go.
(09:13):
And so he actually made the seat of his empire
or his you know, power stronghold uh at somewhere called Novgorod,
which was on the Volkov River. So in eight seventy
nine were it passed away and he gave all of
this land he held to his pal Oleg because Igor
was just a little too young to rule, and so
(09:33):
he was basically, uh you could call this like sort
of like an early form of a trust. He was
holding onto this land and this title until Igor became
of age. Right, so Ruric essentially said, I love my
kid Igor. He stand up a f but he is
just too much of a whipper snapper right now. So
(09:54):
old again Igor moved the capital of l Rus to Kiev,
and they found the Kingdom of the Kievan Russ. This
would you know, you know, this is the origin point
of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and so on. And at its largest,
it's imagine it's stretching from the Baltic Sea to the
Black Sea. So from c to Shining Sea. Igor grows up.
(10:18):
He manages not to die and in en he takes
the throne. Again. This comes to us from the primary chronicle,
as you had said earlier. No, this is a very
tribal socio political time, right. So there you're always playing
king of the hill and you're always trying to fight
the next guy or group coming up. So as soon
(10:40):
as Igor gets the throne in he has to put
down a rebellion because one of their client states or
one of their client communities. The Drevelans decided, you know what,
when Ruric was in play, we understood the game. But Igor,
you're you're new, you're brand new to this. We don't
(11:00):
have to respect you. We don't have to pay you
a tax or a tribute. Igor, you know, forced to
the point says okay, I'll call your bluff, and he
fights them and subdues them. This leads to a reign
of peace until nine five, at which point the same
tribe rebels again. That's right, So Igor had to take
(11:22):
care of this second Drevelyan rebellion, and in order to
do that, he actually had to leave Kiev and go
to where the fighting was. Um. He succeeded in squashing
this rebellion once again. Um and he said, look, you know,
you guys are really testing me. So I'm gonna have
(11:43):
to have some real consequences aside from like, you know,
massacring their people, which would be higher tributes. You can
you could equate it to making them pay more taxes.
I guess right, And he said he pulled a dj
khalin because he was on his way home, but he
stopped and he said another one. He sent his the
majority of his forces back to home base with the tribute,
(12:07):
and then he came back to the drive lands with
a smaller force. And this really weirded out the rebellious tribe.
It's a little weird. Yeah, So they said, okay, let's
not let them physically get all the way to our town.
Let's send out some emissaries and say, dude, what is
going on with you? And then Igor says, you know,
(12:29):
I refused to comment. So they panic and they they
send out a force. They send out an army. They
subdue Egor's forces and they capture them. They take him
to a place just outside their city, and they tied
to birch trees to his legs bent they they're like
bent down to the ground because those are very flexible
trees um and they I'm not sure exactly how they
(12:52):
would do it, maybe tying a rope to the top
and pulling it down to the tippy top of the ground,
and then probably tying it to the trunk to make
like a U shape and sat down your shape. And
then they let them loose, each one of them. And
you can probably figure out what might have happened there,
a very unpleasant form of the splits that you know,
split all the way down, you know, from stem to stern.
(13:12):
Uh Dude was essentially torn in Twain Byzantine chronicler named
Leo the Deacon, upon whom a lot of the Russian
Primary Chronicle is based. This Byzantine writer said that they
literally tore the guy's body apart when these birch trees straightened.
(13:36):
And now we're in a situation where history may not repeat,
but it does rhyme. The king is dead. The king's
heir in this case, a three year old named Siatoslav,
is too young to take the throne, just the way
that Igor was too young to take the throne and
his father Ruric died. However, this situation is different here
(13:57):
because you'll recall that Igor married the subject of today's episode,
Princess Olga of Kiev, and no, what does she do?
Lots of stuff. I have a quick question, though, quick diversion.
Just want to ask you, why do you think he
doubled back? Why do you think Igor doubled back and
sent his men home? He didn't say, he didn't say.
(14:17):
We'll never know. Bizarre, what a what a weird move.
Maybe he forgot his keys, he already won. Maybe he
was hungry, Maybe he needed to use the restroom. You know,
I I don't know much about Kiva and Ruler's choice
of washroom facilities, so I I assumed at this point
(14:38):
in history people just went off a decent distance into
the woods. But you would think, yeah, yeah, I I
don't know. I find that interesting. And I was find
an issue that he mocked them essentially and said, I'm
not going to tell you why I came back. It's
a very odd turn of events that ultimately led to
this guy dying in a very brutal and horrific way.
There's definitely more to this story, and you know, history
(14:59):
is written by the winners, so it is possible maybe
that they asked him to come back, or he felt
he had to for some reason, I mean obviously felt
like you had to. But when Olga learns this information,
she's hit with a lot of stuff at once. Right,
she sure was, Ben, I mean she here's the thing. Uh,
(15:20):
these uh dre Vans Drevians. Yeah, we've seen it spelled
a couple of different ways. Drev Leon's d r e
v l y A n s or. That's right. They
thought that they had the upper hand here, right, because
they figured, oh, she's just a like I like, I said,
that misperception or scary stereotypical perception of what a princess is.
(15:43):
She's some kind of demure aristocrat who they can just
boss around. Now there's a woman in charge quote unquote
that they can use to kind of do whatever they
want with. They're basically thinking this is a strategic victory
for them um as a people, that maybe they can
get the upper hand and force her to mary one
of their prince mal prince mao. That's right, that that
(16:05):
would uh make it so they didn't have to pay
these taxes anymore, are these tributes, and also potentially make
it where they were by default ruling the region, ruling
the roost, right the Kievan rusts right. We do have
to remember that the idea of marrying for love and
for for personal individual romantic feelings is you know, it's
(16:30):
it's not as common back back in the day, right,
so it makes more sense. It's kind of a standard
operating procedure for communities to attempt to align one another
through strategic marriage, thus also upping their own street cred.
Right in this region, they send twenty of their top
notch guys, probably Prince Mel's favorite personal reps to persuade
(16:55):
Princess Olga to marry the guy who was in charge
of her former husband's murderers. Again, this sounds crazy, but
it is not super unusual in these times. Princess Olga
plays into this sort of shrinking violet assumptions that these
people have about her. She welcomes them into her house,
(17:17):
treats them like official, you know, guests of the state.
She does the version of rolling out the red carpet,
wherein she orders her forces to carry the men in
their boats so they don't have to even walk themselves,
as if they were some sort of like Palin Quinn
or like a litter or something like that. Right, really
giving them the royal treatment. But she had she had
(17:37):
something else in mind, didn't she, Right, So they take
these boats, her people take these boats to the courtyard
of the castle. There is a giant trench that has
been pre dug, and they put the boats with the
men in them into the trench. Maybe this is just
you know, maybe it's just a weird party, they might
be thinking. But what happens next? Yeah, I kind of
(17:59):
feel like they probably would have some of them would
have been mortally injured already in that situation. If you're
in a wooden boat and you just get chucked into
a pit, you know, maybe you land upside down on
your neck or something like that, and and and get
a mortal, mortal injury. But that wasn't gonna be enough.
These people were already obviously very uncomfortable, whatever the case
might be, whether they died or not. Um and she
had them all buried alive. And it had to have
(18:20):
been a serious pit, right, I mean, yeah, I mean
it would have taken a long time to fill in.
There would have had to have been no way for
them to claw their way out, or it would have
been very difficult. I'm trying to picture the scene, and uh,
it reminds me of something you might have seen like Caligula. Sure. Yeah.
And here's the thing though. The flaw in this plan,
as I'm sure many of the more Mackavellion of us
(18:41):
listening can can immediately identify, is that there's no one
alive to send word back to Prince Mal and co.
So she has anticipated this, Olga. Olga has not only
anticipated this, but she is taking it to a further extreme.
(19:01):
She picks one of her emissaries to send word back
to Prince Mal and says, you know what, water under
the bridge, brohim, I accept your proposal for this marriage
stuff caveat Asterix. I'll only accept if the Drevians send
part of their company, like a big piece of their army,
(19:22):
to be my escort back to your neck of the woods.
Seems legit. Maybe would have been a little suspicious that
their twenty men had not returned yet. Yeah, maybe they
were just being feted and uh and fed and entertained.
And she she has some logic here for the prince.
She says, after all, you know, we we want everybody
in the land to see what a big deal this is, right,
(19:45):
so send me send me to you in style don't
I deserve it? And what does Prince Mal do? He
seems pretty into it, Sure did. He complied instantly and
sent some of his top chieftains to escort her. Yeah,
and they show up right, and they were met with
another rolling out of the red carpet, as it were,
(20:06):
and she says, hey, guys, you're clearly very dusty from
your journey. Why don't you come into one of our
our famed bath houses and uh and have yourself as
sh fitz. Have you ever heard that a sch fitz?
I've heard it. I don't know if that's what she said,
but I totally get the gist. Yeah, they say it
on the Sopranos a lot. So when you go in
and have like a have a steam bath, that's a Schwitz,
I like. But yeah, so they're they're and they're thinking
(20:28):
they're gonna have a nice a little soak, possibly a
steam bath whatever whatever they got um, and she locks
the doors behind them, and she burns everyone in that
bath house alive. The building collapses like she she kills
another group of people. And so now you think, okay,
(20:49):
let's let's just sort of assume Prince Mal's perspective here
He's got to know something's up at this point. After all,
a good poorsche of his army, his martial forces, has
been buried alive. The chieftains, the ruling class, his personal picks,
his selects have also been burned alive. Don't really he
(21:12):
doesn't know any of this though, right right, He doesn't
know that they have not returned, right, So you have
to at least be thinking about the first group. Kind
of weird that none of those guys got back. So
Olga is not done yet. She says. It's not enough
to kill his top notch army folks, is not enough
to kill the essentially the ruling class of this tribe.
(21:34):
I want to get rid of all of them. So
she says something along the lines of, like my dear fiance,
I will soon be arriving at the Drivean capital of
escort Aston and asking them to arrange a funeral feast
where we can more nova the death of my husband
eagle in the city. Yeah, and that perspective comes from
(21:54):
an article on history Answers dot co dot uk. In
the article olgav Kiev one st do not want to
mess with That is completely accurate. So dude is still
mall still very very much in the dark about what's
happened to his men. He gets this message which goes
on that she wishes for him and his men to
prepare vast quantities of mead, which is like a fermented
(22:17):
honey beer kind of situation. You may well remember from
Bayo Wolf. You ever had mead before, ben, Yeah, multiple times.
Tastes like it's cool. You can definitely taste the honey notes.
And usually I've needs not a not a regular weekli
or monthly thing for me, but usually run into it
at some really cool cultural events. They're a bunch in Atlanta.
(22:40):
I would love to take you guys at some point.
Do they have it at medieval times? They probably have
something they call mead. It might be bud light or
Miller light, the beer that's so good you can drink
it with your mouth. Do they make mead light? Do
you think? Uh, maybe they call it like mead zero.
I like it anyhow, So she says, um, please, you
must prepare are these vast quantities of mead quote that
(23:02):
I may weep over the grave of my husband and
hold a funeral feast for him. And Mel's like word,
I get it, you know, she's keeping it real. You've
got to have these sort of closures in life, and
she's being, you know, very reasonable about all this. You know,
in these our crazy times, what what can we be
except for human? So he says totally and gives Olga
(23:27):
and her crew her entourage safe passage into the territory,
into the town, and once she arrives, she holds this huge, opulent,
opulent being a comparative term opulent funeral for Igor who
has passed. A lot of people show up, a lot
of the townsfolk, a lot of the important individuals of
(23:48):
the time. This is a c and be seeing sort
of thing, kind of the way that the Infinity Mirrors
exhibit at the High Museum was. However, maybe they trust
Olga a little bit too much. Maybe they should have
thought a little more carefully about the context, because they
(24:09):
totally chill acts, they rage, they get wasted, they're super drunk.
But Olga, it turns out, and the forces that she
brought with her are not drunk. Yeah, I don't know
if they were play acting and you know, doing that
thing where someone buys you a shot and you had
enough and you don't want to be rudes. Maybe you
just kind of do a pretense sip and then you know,
(24:30):
hide it. Maybe there was some of that going on.
I don't know, maybe no one else but me does that. Um,
but they definitely got away without being noticed that they
weren't drinking, cause that would be very suspicious, right yep.
Then they got away with it. They waited until the
Drevans were uh drink, drank drunk, and then Olga said, okay,
kill him. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, around five
(24:54):
thousand Drevlins died that day or Drevians would have been
an absolute slaughter, some real red wedding stuff. So wait,
as Billy was wont to say, there's more, Yeah, there's more.
It's what you might consider her coup de graw, her finale,
her big finish Act four of this Revenge Chronicle, because
(25:16):
this wasn't enough for her. She wanted more. She really
wanted to wipe out all of those that had anything
to do with the death of her beloved husband. So, uh,
you know, there obviously were some survivors. Five thousands seems
like a lot because this wouldn't have been a population
of millions. I mean again, these were kind of smaller clans, right,
that's correct. Yeah, this was not a huge metropolis the
(25:38):
way we would understand one today. So the surviving Dravans,
they were super freaked out, essentially, and they begged and
begged and begged, please don't kill us. We will we
will pay with whatever we have. We can't give you
an army to serve you yet, give us a few generations.
(26:02):
But here's what we have. We have, honey, we have furs.
Please take these, leave us with our lives. At this point,
Olga says, you know what, maybe this time I'll be cool.
Give me three pigeons and three sparrows from each of
your houses. And she says, I don't want to impose
a heavy tribute like my husband Igor, because I know
(26:25):
this siege and all these terrible things that I've done
to you have left you in a really bad spot.
So yeah, just give me, uh, three pigeons three sparrows
from each of your house. Not sketchy at all, um,
And I gotta say, this sounds like the stuff of legend.
I have a hard time believing this happened in this
exact way, but this is what the chronicle tells us.
So I'm I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the time being.
(26:46):
But this is genius. So she takes these birds, these
pigeons and sparrows, and she has each one of her
um militiaman. Her soldiers take one and attach a string
to their little bird feet um and in that string
there would be a piece of sulfur which is tied
(27:06):
up in a small piece of cloth. And then as
the sun goes down, Olga tells her men to release
these creepy birds all at once. And we should mention
you didn't think it was a little weird maybe listeners
that uh, everyone just happened to have these birds. Well,
it was a thing. They were like pets are kind
of familiars, like it was very much. They would, you know,
(27:28):
occupy people's houses. Well, they also would make eggs, so
there's a source of food there. Yeah, and they lived
in different parts of houses. Right. So the birds fly
to their various nest. The pigeons fly to the coats,
and coats are a shelter for mammals or birds, especially pigeons.
(27:49):
Like Mike Tyson, notorious pigeon Lover, amongst other things, he
has pigeon coats. And then the sparrows fly under the
eaves where they tend to build their nests so they
can stay away from the rain. Then you had porches, um,
I guess, which just just you know, the front of
a person's house. And then you had hay mows, which
were uh just stacks of hay and barn situations. And
(28:13):
that's when the dove coats, the coops, the porches, the eaves,
the piles of hay all catch ablaze. According to the Chronicle,
there is not a house that escapes this conflagration. And
because the houses all caught fire uh at roughly the
same amount of time, it was difficult to extinguish everything.
(28:36):
People fled from the city and then Olga, who had
her eye on it, said, oh no, no, no, no, no, no,
catch those folks running for the woods. Dude. This is
like the tiny bat bombs. Remember the bat bombs in
uh in Japan. The idea was that they would roost
in the eaves and the and all these houses all
(28:56):
the same time and then the bombs would go off.
That didn't work so well. This seems to have worked
better than the bat bombs. If you guys want to
check that episode out. Might be a fun companion piece.
Um and like you said, Yeah, those little bits of
sulfur ignited all of these very very flammable nesting spots,
and boom, the whole town went up like uh, like
flash paper, and the few who escaped were running into
(29:20):
the woods. What happened next? So here's the heavy metal
part of this. This this is where things build the
same way that one of my favorite songs in the
Hall of Mountain King builds. It just gets more and
more nuts because while this city is burning down, Princess
olgav Kiev orders her forces to take it, and they
(29:43):
capture the surviving elders of the city. She kills some
of them and then others she gives to her crew
to serve as slaves for the rest of her their lives,
and then the ones left she says, remember me and
pay tribute. This is insane. We also know that she
(30:06):
did more than this, so this is like one amazing
revenge story, right. But it's not really the end of
her story because she was still regent for a long
time before her son ascended to the throne. And at
this point, this is where a lot of us are
probably asking ourselves, Hey, the title equal to the Apostles
(30:29):
sounds kind of weird for someone who is best known,
at least according to you Ben and you know, as
as as a a bloody revenge artist. The thing is
that she turned a religious leaf about what about a
decade after her revenge against Prince mal and her husband's murderers.
(30:52):
Because these folks would have practiced paganism, I guess to
for to use kind of a blanket term, right, Well,
they were definitely yeah, Christians would definitely call them pagans,
and Christianity was not seen as a beneficial force to
the Kievan Russ. But Olga visited Constantinople and she met
(31:13):
Christians there and whatever the substance of their conversation may
have been, it impressed her and soon after she converted.
This was weird because her own country, Kievan Rus hated Christianity,
hated the culture of it, hated the spirituality of it.
They just, from top to bottom they thought it sucks.
(31:36):
Christianity was a conquering force. I mean, there was a
real drive to snuff out any pagan societies and convert
them to Christianity. So for her, this warrior queen, to
convert voluntarily is more than a little suspicious. If you
ask me, but who knows. Well, yeah, the chronicle claims
(31:57):
to know, because in the chronicle the authors say that
Olga's conversion, or her epiphany that turns her into a
Christian was part of a ruse kievan ruse right, a
kievan ruse uh in this case, our usc to avoid
marriage to the emperor at the time, Constantine the Seven,
(32:18):
because when she visited his court in Constantinople, she said
they could not possibly marry because he was a Christian
and she was a Pagan, but she would undergo baptism
if it pleased him. So she was baptized by the
patriarch of Constantinople, and she managed to evade marriage the
Constantine because he stood by as her godfather during the baptism.
(32:42):
It's a pretty serious godfather right there. So why is
she known as a saint? Well, she knew when violence worked,
and she apparently also knew when the strategy of the
open hand worked. She began and missionary efforts in modern
day Ukraine. She set up hospitals, and she used public
(33:06):
announcements to teach people about the Christian faith. Everything that
we know about missionary work tends to indicate that people
are more likely to believe in the religion, you are
pitching to them if they associate it with good things
happening to them. Right, So, if if someone sets up
a hospital for you or feeds the poor in the
hungry and then says, by the way, I'm doing this
(33:28):
because of this religion, you are more likely to agree
with them than you would if they said, oh, by
the way, we killed everyone important in your community because
our religion is so great, catching more flies with honey
and all that. So indeed, it took a little while,
but the kingdom of kievan Ruth did eventually become a
(33:48):
Christian one. It took about ten years after Olga's death.
She also, of course given a Christian burial that her
son Vladimir took the throne of Kiev what is now Kiev,
and made Christianity the official religion. And again remember this
is uh. You know, Constantinople would have been sending out
(34:09):
um emissaries and folks that were gonna try to convert
the unwashed pagan masses of Kiev and Ruse to Christianity.
But she succeeded where those folks failed, and that is
what got her that sainthood. And thus we finally arrive
at the reason Princess Olga of Kiev is now known
(34:31):
as Saint Olga of Kiev, equal to the Apostles, Viking,
Saint Queen of Russia, Missionary to Ukraine, Scourge of the
drev Unds. What a ride ride, you know, sometimes it
occurs to me. I'm like, people are out here changing
the world, and I fell asleep when I got back
(34:51):
from the airport trying to put on a pair of pants. Well,
you were very jetlagged, and I'm sure you had adventures
that kept you up. Um, so we'll give you a
pass on that, Ben, that is a real image, though,
I'll tell you was there on one leg in or
uh you know, I when I when I woke up,
I would I would give myself a hard one point
five and putting on the pants in terms of leg applied,
(35:15):
I think my left my left leg made it about
to where that the knee would be and then it
was game over. You know, you can't win them all.
I got I got pants on today at least, so
one step closer to st hoodie. I can attest that.
And it is also game over for this episode, but
not the show, as you would say, Ben, this has
been a really interesting one. I would love to see
this made into a rollicking film like It's got all
(35:37):
the all the stuff. I would watch it too as
maybe one of those extended music videos. I'm really into that. Uh,
it would it would be a great It would be
a great anime too, although my thinking is probably a
little color. Thank you so much for checking out the
show as always. Happy New Year once again to super
(35:59):
producer okay E c Pegram. Thanks to Christopher Hasiotis. Thanks
to our almost said revenge associates, our research associates Gabe
Losier and Ryan Barrish. Thanks to Alex Williams who composed
our theme. Thanks to Jonathan Strickland, the notorious Quister, for
not showing up today. That's always a good day in
the studio. Um, and thanks to you Ben for for
(36:21):
being a friend and for making it back and forgetting
your pants on and looking ship shape despite your sleeplessness
and jet laggery. Thanks to you as well, doll Peak
behind the Curtain. We have one more episode to record,
so I am gonna go shotguns and coffee. It sounds
like a plan. See you next time, folks. For more
(36:46):
podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I heart radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show Ridiculous Historians, friends and neighbors. Thank you
as always for joining us. We always like to say
nice things about our super producer, Casey Pegram, and we
do mean these sincerely. But we have a special announcement today,
one that blew my mind. Actually, another another thing to
(00:51):
add to the long legend of Casey Shadow here. This
guy came in to record today's episode on his actual birthday.
It's true, I'm here and it is my birthday. What
a guy. My name is No, are you still been
your Ben? Right? I am several times over Ben Bulan, Yes,
(01:11):
And this is the first time that we have that
the three of us have been in the studio together
in a little while. Shouts out also to Christopher Haciotis
for pinch hitting there. I checked out that episode. That
was pretty cool man, Thanks man, I enjoyed it. Christopher
is a real mention for pinch hitting while you are
off on adventures. And I alluded a little bit to
(01:32):
your adventures, but I didn't want to spill the tea
as it were, as the kids would say, and what
what what what were you doing? Ben? I was doing
all sorts of non sketchy things. I traveled to I
traveled to Japan, to a couple of different towns in Japan.
One was Nagoya, one was Tokyo, and I was able
(01:53):
to make it back. I have a couple of cool
stories about it, but they maybe maybe store as for
another day, or if we want to knock off early
this afternoon, maybe we can grab a beer and regale
each other. Because I gotta tell you, man, I'm coming
in hot. My body doesn't know what time it is.
My body has a vague spider sense about what day
(02:15):
it is. So luckily this is our favorite history show,
so we don't have to talk about today. And I
don't think we have to talk about specific times on
the clock. But we do have to talk about badasses.
We absolutely do. Ben, How do you like your saints?
I like my murderous I like my saints the way
(02:37):
I like my superheroes. So saints often, at least in Catholicism,
are patrons of one thing or another. So I like
very specific patronages for saints. And I also, like I'm
gonna tell you, I like some Song of Ice and Fires,
some Game of Thrones, e historical gore when it comes
to saints. Well, I'm gonna drop a couple of perlatives here,
(03:00):
and I want you folks out in podcast land to
use your imagination picture what kind of individual might be
attached to these. The Missionary to Ukraine. Okay, that doesn't
sound so exciting. How about the Vikings Saint Queen of
Russia or my personal favorite, the Scourge of the Drevelans,
also known as equal to the Apostles. These are all
(03:22):
titles held by Princess Olga of Kiev, now Sat Olga
of Kiev, and I love that. I love that string
of honorifics too. It's very denerous, Targarian. It's very uh
for the nerds in the crowd, it's very Vigo of Carpathia.
It's very Zena princess warrior or your princess uh Zeno
(03:43):
warrior princess. And just to be clear, that's Vigo v
Carpathian Vego wife. Do you exactly? Oh, you know what?
It bears up on a rewatch. So, st Olga, unlike Vigo,
is a real person, and she was born in a
(04:06):
city in what is today northwestern Russia close to the
Estonian border. The city's name is gonna be a great
fodder for all of us on ridiculous historians. It is
spelled p s k o V. So what do you
think piscoscov discove? Yeah, I don't know. We're probably gonna
(04:26):
have a lot of fun with a lot of these
pronunciations in today this episode. There any uh people with
Estonian heritage out there, please feel free to write in
and and shred us new ones for our pronunciation. We
will do our level best. What do you think should
we go with scove silent p like the it's for
that for only for the reason that it's it's more
fun in my mouth. You know what Visco girls are been?
(04:48):
What are Visco girls? Diisco girls? It's a sort of
a meme thing. My ten year old told me about it.
They are sort of basic, you know, quote unquote. So
they have a particular garb and it's scrunches around their wrists,
short shorts, clean white van slip ons um, some sort
of long baggy T shirt and they always have a
water bottle with bright colored stickers on it that is
(05:09):
the brand hydro flask. And they laugh like this. I
think you told me about this at some point. So
Piscoff kind of sounds like the way this goo girls
laugh is what I'm getting at. There we go, There
we go. And their name is probably based on the
storied history of this of this area. It's gonna be
based on that plug in, right, it's an app. It's
(05:31):
a photo editing app for Instagram. Casey on the case.
Let's let's go back to those names. Viking sat queen,
missionary to Ukraine, equal to the Apostles of Dragons, mother
of Dragon's breakroup change, scourge of the Drevelans. The thing
about Princess Olga is that she earned all of these titles,
(05:52):
and today's story is about how she got there, about
how she went from being a princess, and being a
princess is a problematic, beautiful thing. You know, a lot
of people love the stories of royalty, but unfortunately many,
many princes and princesses end up being historical footnotes. Why
(06:13):
is Olga difference right, Because you think of a princess,
you think of a fair maiden, helpless and defenseless, being
kept somewhere in a tower, you know, relegated to her
room behind lock and key. Uh, this was not the
case for Olga. In nine twelve she married a man
by the name of Igor. Igor they say, you know
that for a fact, because you've got Russian pals. And
(06:34):
Igor was the heir to the throne of Kiev. And
he tell us a little bit about the geography of Kiev.
Luckily I can uh Kiev now a city in Ukraine.
It's part of something we call the Kievan rules are
us apostrophe. Uh Kievan Russ was a federation of Finnish
(06:57):
and East Slavic people in Europe from let's say, around
the ninth century to somewhere in the century. But this
this name was a retronym. It was not called Kevin
Russ at the time. This is a name that we
we sort of made up later as a species. And
when we say a loose federation, um, we have to
(07:22):
be very mindful to realize that this this is a
somewhat common thing historically in a lot of places. Just
the problem of communication makes it difficult for a large, uniform,
uh lockdown empire to exist. And wouldn't this have been
sort of almost something bordering on tribal kind of like
you had chieftains rather than elected officials. Sure, yeah, yeah,
(07:47):
So we see the traces of Russ in the modern
day because nations like Ukraine, Russia and Belarus all sort
of claim Kievan as their their cultural d n A.
You know, obviously bellar ARUs, Russia have the name Russ
(08:07):
in their own country's name. Uh. The name Kievan Ruce
comes to us around somewhere in like the eighteen hundred's,
nineteenth century or so, but as the same meaning as
the land of the Russ, which is how it was
called in the Middle Ages and during Olga's time. The
first stories about the russ from the time that people
(08:29):
historically arrived in this region is told in the Primary Chronicle,
which is also known as the Tale of Bygone Years,
the Russian Primary Chronicle, and this is where we get
a lot of the information about Princess Olga and her hubs.
Igor himself, It's right, Igor was a Viking descendant. His father,
a man by the name of Ruric, was a chieftain.
(08:52):
Like we said, this was a very kind of tribal society.
Um and his people were called the Varangians. I don't
know about that pronunciation. What do you think it reminds
me of the Farangis from star Trek a little bit
um but or the variags. They were also called v
a r y a g s varyags, varyags. There we go.
(09:13):
And so he actually made the seat of his empire
or his you know, power stronghold uh at somewhere called Novgorod,
which was on the Volkov River. So in eight seventy
nine were it passed away and he gave all of
this land he held to his pal Oleg because Igor
was just a little too young to rule, and so
(09:33):
he was basically, uh you could call this like sort
of like an early form of a trust. He was
holding onto this land and this title until Igor became
of age. Right, so Ruric essentially said, I love my
kid Igor. He stand up a f but he is
just too much of a whipper snapper right now. So
(09:54):
old again Igor moved the capital of l Rus to Kiev,
and they found the Kingdom of the Kievan Russ. This
would you know, you know, this is the origin point
of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and so on. And at its largest,
it's imagine it's stretching from the Baltic Sea to the
Black Sea. So from c to Shining Sea. Igor grows up.
(10:18):
He manages not to die and in en he takes
the throne. Again. This comes to us from the primary chronicle,
as you had said earlier. No, this is a very
tribal socio political time, right. So there you're always playing
king of the hill and you're always trying to fight
the next guy or group coming up. So as soon
(10:40):
as Igor gets the throne in he has to put
down a rebellion because one of their client states or
one of their client communities. The Drevelans decided, you know what,
when Ruric was in play, we understood the game. But Igor,
you're you're new, you're brand new to this. We don't
(11:00):
have to respect you. We don't have to pay you
a tax or a tribute. Igor, you know, forced to
the point says okay, I'll call your bluff, and he
fights them and subdues them. This leads to a reign
of peace until nine five, at which point the same
tribe rebels again. That's right, So Igor had to take
(11:22):
care of this second Drevelyan rebellion, and in order to
do that, he actually had to leave Kiev and go
to where the fighting was. Um. He succeeded in squashing
this rebellion once again. Um and he said, look, you know,
you guys are really testing me. So I'm gonna have
(11:43):
to have some real consequences aside from like, you know,
massacring their people, which would be higher tributes. You can
you could equate it to making them pay more taxes.
I guess right, And he said he pulled a dj
khalin because he was on his way home, but he
stopped and he said another one. He sent his the
majority of his forces back to home base with the tribute,
(12:07):
and then he came back to the drive lands with
a smaller force. And this really weirded out the rebellious tribe.
It's a little weird. Yeah, So they said, okay, let's
not let them physically get all the way to our town.
Let's send out some emissaries and say, dude, what is
going on with you? And then Igor says, you know,
(12:29):
I refused to comment. So they panic and they they
send out a force. They send out an army. They
subdue Egor's forces and they capture them. They take him
to a place just outside their city, and they tied
to birch trees to his legs bent they they're like
bent down to the ground because those are very flexible
trees um and they I'm not sure exactly how they
(12:52):
would do it, maybe tying a rope to the top
and pulling it down to the tippy top of the ground,
and then probably tying it to the trunk to make
like a U shape and sat down your shape. And
then they let them loose, each one of them. And
you can probably figure out what might have happened there,
a very unpleasant form of the splits that you know,
split all the way down, you know, from stem to stern.
(13:12):
Uh Dude was essentially torn in Twain Byzantine chronicler named
Leo the Deacon, upon whom a lot of the Russian
Primary Chronicle is based. This Byzantine writer said that they
literally tore the guy's body apart when these birch trees straightened.
(13:36):
And now we're in a situation where history may not repeat,
but it does rhyme. The king is dead. The king's
heir in this case, a three year old named Siatoslav,
is too young to take the throne, just the way
that Igor was too young to take the throne and
his father Ruric died. However, this situation is different here
(13:57):
because you'll recall that Igor married the subject of today's episode,
Princess Olga of Kiev, and no, what does she do?
Lots of stuff. I have a quick question, though, quick diversion.
Just want to ask you, why do you think he
doubled back? Why do you think Igor doubled back and
sent his men home? He didn't say, he didn't say.
(14:17):
We'll never know. Bizarre, what a what a weird move.
Maybe he forgot his keys, he already won. Maybe he
was hungry, Maybe he needed to use the restroom. You know,
I I don't know much about Kiva and Ruler's choice
of washroom facilities, so I I assumed at this point
(14:38):
in history people just went off a decent distance into
the woods. But you would think, yeah, yeah, I I
don't know. I find that interesting. And I was find
an issue that he mocked them essentially and said, I'm
not going to tell you why I came back. It's
a very odd turn of events that ultimately led to
this guy dying in a very brutal and horrific way.
There's definitely more to this story, and you know, history
(14:59):
is written by the winners, so it is possible maybe
that they asked him to come back, or he felt
he had to for some reason, I mean obviously felt
like you had to. But when Olga learns this information,
she's hit with a lot of stuff at once. Right,
she sure was, Ben, I mean she here's the thing. Uh,
(15:20):
these uh dre Vans Drevians. Yeah, we've seen it spelled
a couple of different ways. Drev Leon's d r e
v l y A n s or. That's right. They
thought that they had the upper hand here, right, because
they figured, oh, she's just a like I like, I said,
that misperception or scary stereotypical perception of what a princess is.
(15:43):
She's some kind of demure aristocrat who they can just
boss around. Now there's a woman in charge quote unquote
that they can use to kind of do whatever they
want with. They're basically thinking this is a strategic victory
for them um as a people, that maybe they can
get the upper hand and force her to mary one
of their prince mal prince mao. That's right, that that
(16:05):
would uh make it so they didn't have to pay
these taxes anymore, are these tributes, and also potentially make
it where they were by default ruling the region, ruling
the roost, right the Kievan rusts right. We do have
to remember that the idea of marrying for love and
for for personal individual romantic feelings is you know, it's
(16:30):
it's not as common back back in the day, right,
so it makes more sense. It's kind of a standard
operating procedure for communities to attempt to align one another
through strategic marriage, thus also upping their own street cred.
Right in this region, they send twenty of their top
notch guys, probably Prince Mel's favorite personal reps to persuade
(16:55):
Princess Olga to marry the guy who was in charge
of her former husband's murderers. Again, this sounds crazy, but
it is not super unusual in these times. Princess Olga
plays into this sort of shrinking violet assumptions that these
people have about her. She welcomes them into her house,
(17:17):
treats them like official, you know, guests of the state.
She does the version of rolling out the red carpet,
wherein she orders her forces to carry the men in
their boats so they don't have to even walk themselves,
as if they were some sort of like Palin Quinn
or like a litter or something like that. Right, really
giving them the royal treatment. But she had she had
(17:37):
something else in mind, didn't she, Right, So they take
these boats, her people take these boats to the courtyard
of the castle. There is a giant trench that has
been pre dug, and they put the boats with the
men in them into the trench. Maybe this is just
you know, maybe it's just a weird party, they might
be thinking. But what happens next? Yeah, I kind of
(17:59):
feel like they probably would have some of them would
have been mortally injured already in that situation. If you're
in a wooden boat and you just get chucked into
a pit, you know, maybe you land upside down on
your neck or something like that, and and and get
a mortal, mortal injury. But that wasn't gonna be enough.
These people were already obviously very uncomfortable, whatever the case
might be, whether they died or not. Um and she
had them all buried alive. And it had to have
(18:20):
been a serious pit, right, I mean, yeah, I mean
it would have taken a long time to fill in.
There would have had to have been no way for
them to claw their way out, or it would have
been very difficult. I'm trying to picture the scene, and uh,
it reminds me of something you might have seen like Caligula. Sure. Yeah.
And here's the thing though. The flaw in this plan,
as I'm sure many of the more Mackavellion of us
(18:41):
listening can can immediately identify, is that there's no one
alive to send word back to Prince Mal and co.
So she has anticipated this, Olga. Olga has not only
anticipated this, but she is taking it to a further extreme.
(19:01):
She picks one of her emissaries to send word back
to Prince Mal and says, you know what, water under
the bridge, brohim, I accept your proposal for this marriage
stuff caveat Asterix. I'll only accept if the Drevians send
part of their company, like a big piece of their army,
(19:22):
to be my escort back to your neck of the woods.
Seems legit. Maybe would have been a little suspicious that
their twenty men had not returned yet. Yeah, maybe they
were just being feted and uh and fed and entertained.
And she she has some logic here for the prince.
She says, after all, you know, we we want everybody
in the land to see what a big deal this is, right,
(19:45):
so send me send me to you in style don't
I deserve it? And what does Prince Mal do? He
seems pretty into it, Sure did. He complied instantly and
sent some of his top chieftains to escort her. Yeah,
and they show up right, and they were met with
another rolling out of the red carpet, as it were,
(20:06):
and she says, hey, guys, you're clearly very dusty from
your journey. Why don't you come into one of our
our famed bath houses and uh and have yourself as
sh fitz. Have you ever heard that a sch fitz?
I've heard it. I don't know if that's what she said,
but I totally get the gist. Yeah, they say it
on the Sopranos a lot. So when you go in
and have like a have a steam bath, that's a Schwitz,
I like. But yeah, so they're they're and they're thinking
(20:28):
they're gonna have a nice a little soak, possibly a
steam bath whatever whatever they got um, and she locks
the doors behind them, and she burns everyone in that
bath house alive. The building collapses like she she kills
another group of people. And so now you think, okay,
(20:49):
let's let's just sort of assume Prince Mal's perspective here
He's got to know something's up at this point. After all,
a good poorsche of his army, his martial forces, has
been buried alive. The chieftains, the ruling class, his personal picks,
his selects have also been burned alive. Don't really he
(21:12):
doesn't know any of this though, right right, He doesn't
know that they have not returned, right, So you have
to at least be thinking about the first group. Kind
of weird that none of those guys got back. So
Olga is not done yet. She says. It's not enough
to kill his top notch army folks, is not enough
to kill the essentially the ruling class of this tribe.
(21:34):
I want to get rid of all of them. So
she says something along the lines of, like my dear fiance,
I will soon be arriving at the Drivean capital of
escort Aston and asking them to arrange a funeral feast
where we can more nova the death of my husband
eagle in the city. Yeah, and that perspective comes from
(21:54):
an article on history Answers dot co dot uk. In
the article olgav Kiev one st do not want to
mess with That is completely accurate. So dude is still
mall still very very much in the dark about what's
happened to his men. He gets this message which goes
on that she wishes for him and his men to
prepare vast quantities of mead, which is like a fermented
(22:17):
honey beer kind of situation. You may well remember from
Bayo Wolf. You ever had mead before, ben, Yeah, multiple times.
Tastes like it's cool. You can definitely taste the honey notes.
And usually I've needs not a not a regular weekli
or monthly thing for me, but usually run into it
at some really cool cultural events. They're a bunch in Atlanta.
(22:40):
I would love to take you guys at some point.
Do they have it at medieval times? They probably have
something they call mead. It might be bud light or
Miller light, the beer that's so good you can drink
it with your mouth. Do they make mead light? Do
you think? Uh, maybe they call it like mead zero.
I like it anyhow, So she says, um, please, you
must prepare are these vast quantities of mead quote that
(23:02):
I may weep over the grave of my husband and
hold a funeral feast for him. And Mel's like word,
I get it, you know, she's keeping it real. You've
got to have these sort of closures in life, and
she's being, you know, very reasonable about all this. You know,
in these our crazy times, what what can we be
except for human? So he says totally and gives Olga
(23:27):
and her crew her entourage safe passage into the territory,
into the town, and once she arrives, she holds this huge, opulent,
opulent being a comparative term opulent funeral for Igor who
has passed. A lot of people show up, a lot
of the townsfolk, a lot of the important individuals of
(23:48):
the time. This is a c and be seeing sort
of thing, kind of the way that the Infinity Mirrors
exhibit at the High Museum was. However, maybe they trust
Olga a little bit too much. Maybe they should have
thought a little more carefully about the context, because they
(24:09):
totally chill acts, they rage, they get wasted, they're super drunk.
But Olga, it turns out, and the forces that she
brought with her are not drunk. Yeah, I don't know
if they were play acting and you know, doing that
thing where someone buys you a shot and you had
enough and you don't want to be rudes. Maybe you
just kind of do a pretense sip and then you know,
(24:30):
hide it. Maybe there was some of that going on.
I don't know, maybe no one else but me does that. Um,
but they definitely got away without being noticed that they
weren't drinking, cause that would be very suspicious, right yep.
Then they got away with it. They waited until the
Drevans were uh drink, drank drunk, and then Olga said, okay,
kill him. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, around five
(24:54):
thousand Drevlins died that day or Drevians would have been
an absolute slaughter, some real red wedding stuff. So wait,
as Billy was wont to say, there's more, Yeah, there's more.
It's what you might consider her coup de graw, her finale,
her big finish Act four of this Revenge Chronicle, because
(25:16):
this wasn't enough for her. She wanted more. She really
wanted to wipe out all of those that had anything
to do with the death of her beloved husband. So, uh,
you know, there obviously were some survivors. Five thousands seems
like a lot because this wouldn't have been a population
of millions. I mean again, these were kind of smaller clans, right,
that's correct. Yeah, this was not a huge metropolis the
(25:38):
way we would understand one today. So the surviving Dravans,
they were super freaked out, essentially, and they begged and
begged and begged, please don't kill us. We will we
will pay with whatever we have. We can't give you
an army to serve you yet, give us a few generations.
(26:02):
But here's what we have. We have, honey, we have furs.
Please take these, leave us with our lives. At this point,
Olga says, you know what, maybe this time I'll be cool.
Give me three pigeons and three sparrows from each of
your houses. And she says, I don't want to impose
a heavy tribute like my husband Igor, because I know
(26:25):
this siege and all these terrible things that I've done
to you have left you in a really bad spot.
So yeah, just give me, uh, three pigeons three sparrows
from each of your house. Not sketchy at all, um,
And I gotta say, this sounds like the stuff of legend.
I have a hard time believing this happened in this
exact way, but this is what the chronicle tells us.
So I'm I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the time being.
(26:46):
But this is genius. So she takes these birds, these
pigeons and sparrows, and she has each one of her
um militiaman. Her soldiers take one and attach a string
to their little bird feet um and in that string
there would be a piece of sulfur which is tied
(27:06):
up in a small piece of cloth. And then as
the sun goes down, Olga tells her men to release
these creepy birds all at once. And we should mention
you didn't think it was a little weird maybe listeners
that uh, everyone just happened to have these birds. Well,
it was a thing. They were like pets are kind
of familiars, like it was very much. They would, you know,
(27:28):
occupy people's houses. Well, they also would make eggs, so
there's a source of food there. Yeah, and they lived
in different parts of houses. Right. So the birds fly
to their various nest. The pigeons fly to the coats,
and coats are a shelter for mammals or birds, especially pigeons.
(27:49):
Like Mike Tyson, notorious pigeon Lover, amongst other things, he
has pigeon coats. And then the sparrows fly under the
eaves where they tend to build their nests so they
can stay away from the rain. Then you had porches, um,
I guess, which just just you know, the front of
a person's house. And then you had hay mows, which
were uh just stacks of hay and barn situations. And
(28:13):
that's when the dove coats, the coops, the porches, the eaves,
the piles of hay all catch ablaze. According to the Chronicle,
there is not a house that escapes this conflagration. And
because the houses all caught fire uh at roughly the
same amount of time, it was difficult to extinguish everything.
(28:36):
People fled from the city and then Olga, who had
her eye on it, said, oh no, no, no, no, no, no,
catch those folks running for the woods. Dude. This is
like the tiny bat bombs. Remember the bat bombs in
uh in Japan. The idea was that they would roost
in the eaves and the and all these houses all
(28:56):
the same time and then the bombs would go off.
That didn't work so well. This seems to have worked
better than the bat bombs. If you guys want to
check that episode out. Might be a fun companion piece.
Um and like you said, Yeah, those little bits of
sulfur ignited all of these very very flammable nesting spots,
and boom, the whole town went up like uh, like
flash paper, and the few who escaped were running into
(29:20):
the woods. What happened next? So here's the heavy metal
part of this. This this is where things build the
same way that one of my favorite songs in the
Hall of Mountain King builds. It just gets more and
more nuts because while this city is burning down, Princess
olgav Kiev orders her forces to take it, and they
(29:43):
capture the surviving elders of the city. She kills some
of them and then others she gives to her crew
to serve as slaves for the rest of her their lives,
and then the ones left she says, remember me and
pay tribute. This is insane. We also know that she
(30:06):
did more than this, so this is like one amazing
revenge story, right. But it's not really the end of
her story because she was still regent for a long
time before her son ascended to the throne. And at
this point, this is where a lot of us are
probably asking ourselves, Hey, the title equal to the Apostles
(30:29):
sounds kind of weird for someone who is best known,
at least according to you Ben and you know, as
as as a a bloody revenge artist. The thing is
that she turned a religious leaf about what about a
decade after her revenge against Prince mal and her husband's murderers.
(30:52):
Because these folks would have practiced paganism, I guess to
for to use kind of a blanket term, right, Well,
they were definitely yeah, Christians would definitely call them pagans,
and Christianity was not seen as a beneficial force to
the Kievan Russ. But Olga visited Constantinople and she met
(31:13):
Christians there and whatever the substance of their conversation may
have been, it impressed her and soon after she converted.
This was weird because her own country, Kievan Rus hated Christianity,
hated the culture of it, hated the spirituality of it.
They just, from top to bottom they thought it sucks.
(31:36):
Christianity was a conquering force. I mean, there was a
real drive to snuff out any pagan societies and convert
them to Christianity. So for her, this warrior queen, to
convert voluntarily is more than a little suspicious. If you
ask me, but who knows. Well, yeah, the chronicle claims
(31:57):
to know, because in the chronicle the authors say that
Olga's conversion, or her epiphany that turns her into a
Christian was part of a ruse kievan ruse right, a
kievan ruse uh in this case, our usc to avoid
marriage to the emperor at the time, Constantine the Seven,
(32:18):
because when she visited his court in Constantinople, she said
they could not possibly marry because he was a Christian
and she was a Pagan, but she would undergo baptism
if it pleased him. So she was baptized by the
patriarch of Constantinople, and she managed to evade marriage the
Constantine because he stood by as her godfather during the baptism.
(32:42):
It's a pretty serious godfather right there. So why is
she known as a saint? Well, she knew when violence worked,
and she apparently also knew when the strategy of the
open hand worked. She began and missionary efforts in modern
day Ukraine. She set up hospitals, and she used public
(33:06):
announcements to teach people about the Christian faith. Everything that
we know about missionary work tends to indicate that people
are more likely to believe in the religion, you are
pitching to them if they associate it with good things
happening to them. Right, So, if if someone sets up
a hospital for you or feeds the poor in the
hungry and then says, by the way, I'm doing this
(33:28):
because of this religion, you are more likely to agree
with them than you would if they said, oh, by
the way, we killed everyone important in your community because
our religion is so great, catching more flies with honey
and all that. So indeed, it took a little while,
but the kingdom of kievan Ruth did eventually become a
(33:48):
Christian one. It took about ten years after Olga's death.
She also, of course given a Christian burial that her
son Vladimir took the throne of Kiev what is now Kiev,
and made Christianity the official religion. And again remember this
is uh. You know, Constantinople would have been sending out
(34:09):
um emissaries and folks that were gonna try to convert
the unwashed pagan masses of Kiev and Ruse to Christianity.
But she succeeded where those folks failed, and that is
what got her that sainthood. And thus we finally arrive
at the reason Princess Olga of Kiev is now known
(34:31):
as Saint Olga of Kiev, equal to the Apostles, Viking,
Saint Queen of Russia, Missionary to Ukraine, Scourge of the
drev Unds. What a ride ride, you know, sometimes it
occurs to me. I'm like, people are out here changing
the world, and I fell asleep when I got back
(34:51):
from the airport trying to put on a pair of pants. Well,
you were very jetlagged, and I'm sure you had adventures
that kept you up. Um, so we'll give you a
pass on that, Ben, that is a real image, though,
I'll tell you was there on one leg in or
uh you know, I when I when I woke up,
I would I would give myself a hard one point
five and putting on the pants in terms of leg applied,
(35:15):
I think my left my left leg made it about
to where that the knee would be and then it
was game over. You know, you can't win them all.
I got I got pants on today at least, so
one step closer to st hoodie. I can attest that.
And it is also game over for this episode, but
not the show, as you would say, Ben, this has
been a really interesting one. I would love to see
this made into a rollicking film like It's got all
(35:37):
the all the stuff. I would watch it too as
maybe one of those extended music videos. I'm really into that. Uh,
it would it would be a great It would be
a great anime too, although my thinking is probably a
little color. Thank you so much for checking out the
show as always. Happy New Year once again to super
(35:59):
producer okay E c Pegram. Thanks to Christopher Hasiotis. Thanks
to our almost said revenge associates, our research associates Gabe
Losier and Ryan Barrish. Thanks to Alex Williams who composed
our theme. Thanks to Jonathan Strickland, the notorious Quister, for
not showing up today. That's always a good day in
the studio. Um, and thanks to you Ben for for
(36:21):
being a friend and for making it back and forgetting
your pants on and looking ship shape despite your sleeplessness
and jet laggery. Thanks to you as well, doll Peak
behind the Curtain. We have one more episode to record,
so I am gonna go shotguns and coffee. It sounds
like a plan. See you next time, folks. For more
(36:46):
podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I heart radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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