Ruthenia[a] is an exonym, originally used in Medieval Latin, as one of several terms for Kievan Rus'.[1] Originally, the term Rus' land referred to a triangular area, which mainly corresponds to the tribe of Polans in Dnieper Ukraine.[2] Ruthenia was used to refer to the East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox people of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austria-Hungary, mainly to Ukrainians and sometimes Belarusians, corresponding to the territories of modern Belarus, Ukraine, Eastern Poland and some of western Russia.[3][4][5][6]
Historically, in a broader sense, the term was used to refer to all the territories under Kievan dominion (mostly East Slavs).[7][8]
The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (1772–1918), corresponding to parts of Western Ukraine, was referred to as Ruthenia and its people as Ruthenians.[5] As a result of a Ukrainian national identity gradually dominating over much of present-day Ukraine in the 19th and 20th centuries, the endonym Rusyn is now mostly used among a minority of peoples on the territory of the Carpathian Mountains, including Carpathian Ruthenia.[9]
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:1
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Besides the Greco-Byzantine term Rosia to describe Rus', Latin documents used several related terms – Ruscia, Russia, Ruzzia – for Kievan Rus' as a whole. Subsequently, the terms Ruteni and Rutheni were used to describe Ukrainian and Belarusan Eastern Christians (especially members of the Uniate, later Greek Catholic, Church) residing in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The German, French, and English versions of those terms – Ruthenen, Ruthène, Ruthenian – generally were applied only to the inhabitants of Austrian Galicia and Bukovina of Hungarian Transcarpathia.