The Rus’ Genealogy component of the MAPA project is part of a larger attempt to shift the perceptions of modern scholars to include Rus’ in the wider narrative of medieval Europe, and to create a picture of the medieval European world that fits the evidence from the primary sources -- one that stretches from the Atlantic in the west to the Dnieper River in the East. One of the chief ways to do this is by looking at the connectivity between Rus’ and the rest of Europe, and one of the richest sources of data is in the arena of dynastic marriage. The ruling family of Rus’, the Volodimerovichi (also known as the Riurikids), had marital connections with the ruling families of most of medieval Europe.
The project displays these marriages on a map of medieval Europe, thereby visually and dramatically highlighting the way in which the Volodimerovichi of Rus’ intermarried throughout Europe. It is clear from first glance that Rus’ was a full participant in the medieval European system of dynastic marriage. Tools were also built into the map to allow for searches, chronological scalability and geographic scalability. The Rus' Genealogy Project was funded by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) and assisted by technical support from Kostyantyn Bondarenko (HURI IT Specialist) and the Harvard Center for Geographical Analysis.