His relations with the Byzantine Empire have not yet been sufficiently cleared up. He himself was the son of a Byzantine princess, and his daughter Maria was married to Leo, son of the unfortunate emperor Romanus Diogenes, who was blinded in 1071 and banished to an island. Leo then made an attempt at revolt against Alexius Comnenus, but was poisoned in 1116. Vladimir now espoused the cause of Leo’s son Basil and sent an army to the Danube, which returned without accomplishing its purpose. According to a later tradition, which arose under the influence of Moscow, the emperor Alexius Comnenus, in order to put an end to the devastation of Thrace by the Russian troops, sent to Vladimir a diadem and other imperial insignia through Neophyte, metropolitan of Ephesus, who put the diadem on Vladimir’s head and called him czar. But contemporary accounts tell us nothing of all this, and it is inherently improbable that Byzantium would bestow upon the Russian grand prince, who was no longer formidable, a title whose exclusive possession it so jealously guarded. On the other hand, it is known that in 1122, or six years after the supposed campaign to Thrace, a granddaughter of Monomakh was married to a prince of the house of Romanus. [Sidenote: [1122-1125 A.D.]] But the greater portion of Monomakh’s military activity fell into the reigns of his two predecessors. He was in his sixty-first year when he became grand-prince, and he naturally avoided all fighting as far as it could be avoided, employing force only when requisite to maintain his position as overlord of Russia. As far as circumstances permitted, he was a prince of peace, and a number of most important legislative measures are attributed to him, especially the laws relating to usury and to the half-free (_zakupi_). Russia had suffered very severely from the civil wars and the raids of the Polovtsi, and men of small property were reduced to extreme poverty. Being unable to maintain themselves on their wasted lands, they went to live in large numbers on the estates of the rich, who sought to reduce them to absolute slavery, or else they borrowed money at usurious rates and soon sank into a servile condition. To remedy this ruinous state of affairs, Monomakh reduced the rate of interest from 120 per cent. to 20 per cent., and decreed that one who had paid one year’s interest according to the old rate, was thereby absolved from his debt. He also ordered the expulsion of the Jews from the whole of Russia.[9] But the problem of the _zakupi_ could not be solved in this summary fashion. According to the regulations adopted they were to be regarded as free men who had become bound to the soil by contract, but who retained the right to acquire property and were not subject to the master’s jurisdiction. A half-free man loses his freedom only when he attempts to escape from his master. It was also fixed what payments and services he was to render, and it was made impossible for the lord to