by way of ousting his half-brother from all his possessions, sent and demanded her hand for himself. The maiden haughtily refused to wed the “son of a slave,” and added that she was already pledged to Yaropalk; whereupon the headstrong lover stormed the town, slew her father and two brothers, and bore off the unwilling bride--a wooing which somewhat resembles that of William the Norman and Matilda of Flanders some half-hundred years later. The despoiled rival had, on the approach of Vladimir and his war-carles, shut himself up in Kiev, but growing doubtful of the goodwill of the inhabitants, he suffered himself to be persuaded by false counsellors to move into the small town of Rodnya. In consequence of this faint-hearted desertion Kiev threw open her gates to Vladimir, who followed up his good fortune by besieging the Prince in his new refuge. Pressed by assault without and famine within--the miseries suffered by the Rodnya folk have passed into a proverb--the hunted Kniaz rashly, or perhaps despairingly, agreed to visit his peace-feigning brother at his palace in Kiev. Yaropalk alone was allowed to enter the courtyard doors, behind which lurked two Varangian guards, who used their blades quickly and well, and Vladimir reigned as sole Prince of the Russians. [Sidenote: 980] The early years of the new reign were devoted to family-founding on a generous scale, the Prince, by his several wives and concubines, becoming the father of manifold sons, all of whom bore names of distinctly Slavonic resonance. By the raped Rogneda he had Isiaslav, Mstislav, Yaroslav, Vsevolod, and two daughters; a second wife, of Czech origin, presented him with Vouytchislav; a third was the mother of Sviatoslav, and a fourth, of Bulgarian nationality, was responsible for Boris and Glieb. In addition to his own ample offspring he adopted into his family Sviatopolk, the posthumous son of Yaropalk. But the pressure of family cares did not absorb his undivided attention. On the western border several Russian strongholds in the district of Galitz (Galicia) had been seized during the embarrassed reign of Yaropalk by Mscislav, Duke of Poland, and for the recovery of these Vladimir set his armed men in motion. Tcherven, Peremysl, and other places fell into his hands, but the wars on the Polish march dragged on at intervals and outlasted the reigns of both princes. This was the first clash of the two neighbour nations whose history was to be so dramatically interblended. The Duke of Poland had his hands so full with the intrusive affairs of Bohemia, Hungary, the Western Empire, and the Wends, that he was obliged to content himself with a policy of defence on his eastern border, and Vladimir was able to turn his arms in other directions. In 982 he suppressed a revolt of the Viatitches, and in the next year extended his authority among the Livs as far as the Baltic. According to the Chronicle of the Icelandic annalist Sturleson, these