Vladimir II Monomakh (Old East Slavic: Володимѣръ Мономахъ, romanized: Volodiměrŭ Monomakhŭ;[a] Christian name: Vasily;[2] 26 May 1053 – 19 May 1125) was Grand Prince of Kiev from 1113 to 1125.

In 1046, to seal an armistice in the Rus'–Byzantine War, Vsevolod Yaroslavich, then a junior member of the princely Rurikids of Kievan Rus', contracted a diplomatic marriage with a relative of the reigning Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos (r. 1042–1055), from whom Vladimir (born in 1053) likely inherited his sobriquet, Monomakh.

[5] The name and ancestry of his mother are unknown; Byzantine sources do not mention the marriage at all, and the Primary Chronicle only says that his father Vsevolod had him by a tsesaritsa Gr'kyna, meaning "Greek princess".

[1] The fact that Vladimir Vsevolodovich was later given the nickname Monomakh provides the only significant clue, namely that his mother was likely a member of the Byzantine Monomachos family, the same as the then-reigning emperor Constantine IX.

[6] Contemporary Byzantine naming-practice allowed the adoption of a maternal surname if convention regarded the mother's family as of a more exalted origin than the father's.

[6] In his famous Instruction (also known as The Testament) to his own children, Monomakh mentions that he conducted 83 military campaigns and 19 times made peace with the Polovtsi.

The 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus reported that, in what would have been his first marriage, Vladimir wed Gytha of Wessex, daughter of Harold, King of England, who had fallen at Hastings in 1066 and of Edith Swannesha.