Kosnyatin was a man of distinction in Novgorod, who fought devotedly for Yaroslav during his struggles with Sviatopolk. Kosnyatin was now imprisoned by Yaroslav, who put him to death two years later. The cause of this seemingly ungrateful treatment is not known, but doubtless Kosnyatin, demanding too much for himself and for Novgorod, opposed the prince as energetically as he had formerly fought for him. In other words, he encroached on the sovereignty of Yaroslav, and his actions became of the kind which rulers of states treat as criminal, and which they meet with one answer at all times and places,—that answer is permanent removal. Yaroslav the Lawgiver, the man who completed the foundation of the ancient Russian state, ascended the throne in 1016 and ruled for thirty-eight years. This was the most prosperous period of ancient Russia. The hordes of the steppes were kept in subjection, and about one third of Finland added to Russia, who thus held both sides of the water highway on the north. But Yaroslav’s claims to the title of a great ruler rest on another basis. He was a legislator, an administrator, a founder of cities. He framed the first code of laws, the famous Russkaya Pravda, or Russian Right; he carried on the most orderly government known till that day. In the restoration of boundaries and in internal improvements his activity was not less important. He recovered Galitch, which Boleslav of Poland had seized on his way home from his campaign with Sviatopolk the Accursed. He founded many towns and cities, two of which are well known in our time, Yaroslavl on the Volga, and Yurieff, now Dorpat. Wishing Kief to rival Tsargrad, he spent much of the revenue exacted from tributary peoples in adorning his capital. He established the first school in the north, at Novgorod, a school for three hundred students. He concluded more alliances and maintained a more extended intercourse with European sovereigns than any prince of ancient Russia. His later wars were mostly with the Petchenegs, those robbers of the steppe who had made a drinking-cup of his grandfather’s skull, and he at last succeeded in crushing them so completely that they never again took up arms against him, and even their name finally disappeared. All his children were from one mother, Ingigerd of Sweden. One of his daughters married King Andrew of Hungary; another became the wife of Harold Hardrada, King of Norway; a third, Anna, married Henry I of France and took with her the beautiful missal afterwards used in the Cathedral of Rheims at the coronation of the French kings. When Peter the Great visited that city in 1717, the missal was shown him as of the rarest antiquity, no one even knowing the language in which it was written. To the astonishment of all present, the Emperor exclaimed: “Why, this is my own Slavonic,” and he began to read in a loud voice. This missal, a masterpiece of penmanship, and one of the most ancient specimens of Slavonic writing,