A book of such a historic sweep is a challenging but also exciting project, distilling 12 busy centuries into relatively few pages. As such, I have made all kinds of simplifications and omissions, and also have inevitably depended on the ideas and inspirations of many of my colleagues, sometimes directly but as often simply through intellectual osmosis, as their words and ideas have informed my own. Some are name-checked in the “Further reading” sections through the book, but some deserve specific note. Dominic—Chai—Lieven was an inspirational supervisor to my PhD and a thoughtful and generous senior colleague since, whose views on tsarism and empires in general have helped enrich my thinking throughout my career. I am indebted to Peter Jackson for comradeship and co-teaching at Keele University, and much of my thoughts on the early centuries of the Rus’ and the Golden Horde are derived from his scholarship and my no-doubt-imperfect recollections of his words. Finally, I never met W. Bruce Lincoln and, as he died in 2000, never will, but I also want to note how his writings inspired me with their self-evident proof that it is possible to write good history that is also engaging prose. There are many more who could and should have been mentioned, and my humble apologies to all those I have slighted in what otherwise could have been an acknowledgments section the length of a chapter.
On a more personal level, I also want to thank those who read earlier drafts and gave their comments: Anna Arutunyan, Daria Mosolova, Robert Otto and Katherine Wilkins. I appreciate their generosity with their time and thoughts, and apologize for any remaining errors and infelicities, which are all my own.
Likewise, my thanks to Robyn Drury at Ebury Publishing and Peter Joseph and Grace Towery at Hanover Square Press for their enthusiastic support and to the copy editor, Howard Watson, for his meticulous and sympathetic work.
Finally, I do want to record my appreciation of the European University Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre for the invitation to be a Jean Montnet Fellow there in 2018–19, and its director, Brigid Laffin, for her support. The first outlines of this book were hashed out in the EUI’s Tuscan hillside fastness: there are perks to an academic’s life.