Alexander Nevsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander Nevsky knelt at his own funeral in 1263, and the witnesses swore he moved. As the prayer of absolution was read over his body, he reportedly extended his hand to receive it. The veneration began almost at once. Metropolitan Archbishop Cyril stood over the grave in Vladimir and told the mourners that the sun of the Suzdalian land had set, that there would never be another prince like him. The priests, the monks, the poor and the wealthy answered together: it is our end.

  He was born in Pereslavl-Zalessky on the 13th of May 1221, the second son of a grand prince, and he died returning from the camp of a Mongol khan. Between those two points sits a man who beat Swedish and German armies on the western frontier, then chose to kneel before the Golden Horde in the east. How does a prince become both a saint and, to some, a collaborator? Why did rulers from Peter the Great to Joseph Stalin reach for his name centuries after he died? And what really happened on the ice of a frozen lake in 1242?

• 2. Two Battles, One Name

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  The 15th of July 1240 gave Alexander the word that would follow him forever. A Swedish army, led by Birger Jarl and made up of Norwegians and Finnish tribes, had landed where the rivers Izhora and Neva meet in northwestern Russia. Alexander struck them suddenly with a small force and won. The fight is the Battle of the Neva, and from it, roughly two centuries later in the 15th century, he took the sobriquet Nevsky, meaning of the Neva.

  No Swedish source mentions this battle at all. Every account comes from two Russian sources that historians call largely inadequate. The Soviet-era historian Igor Pavlovich Shaskol'skii argued the Swedish attack was coordinated, citing the Life of Alexander Nevsky, which claims the Swedes meant to conquer Novgorod. John Lister Illingworth Fennell disagreed flatly, finding no evidence of coordination between Swedes, Germans, and Danes, and reading it instead as part of the long Russo-Swedish conflict over Finland and Karelia.

  The second great clash came on the 5th of April 1242 at Lake Peipus. Alexander faced the Livonian heavy cavalry led by Hermann of Dorpat, brother of Albert of Buxhoeveden, and won the Battle on the Ice. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle records the German view, lamenting that the land reverted to the Russians and that failing to hold a fair land is sure to end in disaster. Later in 1242 the Germans agreed to give up occupied Russian territory and exchange prisoners. Yet Fennell noted that the chronicle of Suzdal downplays the battle so far that Alexander's brother Andrey appears as the hero.

• 3. The Bargain With The Horde

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  In 1259 Alexander led an army against the very city he had governed. Novgorod had refused to pay tribute to the Golden Horde, and Alexander forced it to comply. The chronicles describe nobles who thought the tax would be easy for themselves but fall hard on the lesser men. They then describe the Mongols riding through the streets, writing down the Christian houses, household by household.

  This was the price of his survival, and Alexander paid it faithfully within his own domains. He had agreed to pay tribute to the Golden Horde in exchange for the freedom to preserve the Eastern Orthodox Church, while he fought enemies to the west and south. Some historians read this as a defense of the Orthodox orientation of the East Slavs, a path begun under Vladimir the Great and his grandmother Olga of Kiev. Orlando Figes wrote that Nevsky distrusted the West as a greater threat to Orthodox Russia than the Golden Horde, and that this realpolitik troubled the chroniclers after he was made a saint, for in their terms he had colluded with the infidel.

  Fennell put it more sharply. He argued that the Tatar yoke began not so much with the invasion of Batu, but from the moment Alexander Nevsky betrayed his brothers. That brother was Andrey, who had received the title of grand prince of Vladimir in 1248, acted independently against the Mongols, built an anti-Mongol coalition, and was driven into exile in Sweden. Alexander assumed the title of grand prince of Vladimir in 1252.

• 4. The Prince Of The Chronicles

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  Tales of the Life and Courage of the Pious and Great Prince Alexander gave him a body built from scripture. Written into the Pskov Chronicles around 1260 to 1280, it says he was taller than others, that his voice reached the people like a trumpet, and that his face was like the face of Joseph. His power was a part of the power of Samson, and God gave him the wisdom of Solomon. This prince, it says, used to defeat but was never defeated.

  Little is known of his actual youth. He spent most of it in Pereslavl-Zalessky, and almost nothing survives about the activities of his father's children before 1238. His eldest brother Fyodor died in 1233 at the age of 14. In 1236 the Novgorod Republic appointed Alexander as prince, a choice made by his father but approved by the veche, the city assembly that needed his armies. When his father was called away in 1238 by the Mongol invasion of Northeastern Russia, Alexander began to rule on his own.

  The veche was a fickle master. Alexander enforced the anti-Western views of his family, which made him unpopular. In late 1240 or early 1241, fearing he might become a sole ruler, the Novgorodians banished him to Pereslavl-Zalessky. They recalled him within months, and in the spring of 1241 he returned from exile, assembled an army, and retook Pskov and Koporye from the crusaders, executing the Votians who had cooperated with the invaders.

• 5. Saint And Relic

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  On his deathbed Alexander took the Great Schema, the strictest monastic vows, and the name Alexey. He had died on the 14th of November 1263 in Gorodets-on-the-Volga, returning from a diplomatic mission to Berke, leader of the Golden Horde, at Sarai. On the 23rd of November 1263 he was buried in the church of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Holy Mother of God in Vladimir.

  In 1380 his story took a stranger turn. Before the Battle of Kulikovo, a vision prompted the uncovering of his remains, which were found to be incorrupt and placed in a shrine. Macarius, Metropolitan of Moscow, canonized him as a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547. His relics then became objects of state. By order of Peter the Great they were removed from Vladimir on the 11th of August 1723 and carried to Saint Petersburg, installed in the Annunciation Church of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra on the 30th of August 1724.

  The shrine grew ever more lavish. In 1753 Empress Elizabeth of Russia donated a silver shrine and sarcophagus made from 90 pounds of silver. During the 1922 seizure of church valuables, the sarcophagus was opened, the relics removed, and the silver shrine sent to the Hermitage Museum. The relics returned to the Holy Trinity Cathedral in 1989. On the 12th of September 2023, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow returned them to the silver sarcophagus.

• 6. A Name For Every Era

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  In 1938 Sergei Eisenstein turned the dead prince into a warning about German aggression. His film Alexander Nevsky, scored by Sergei Prokofiev, who later reworked it into a concert cantata, fixed the storyline of Nevsky as the savior of Russia. Its depiction of the Battle on the Ice has inspired many films since. The proverbial line, whoever will come to us with a sword, from a sword will perish, came from the film, spoken by actor Nikolay Cherkasov, who paraphrased Matthew 26 verse 52.

  The state kept reaching for him whenever it needed unity. After Operation Barbarossa, the film was re-released in 1941, and Joseph Stalin used it to mobilize Russian patriotism, framing the fight as the Great Patriotic War. In 1942 Soviet authorities created an Order of Alexander Nevsky to revive the memory of his battles with the Germans, echoing the imperial Order of Saint Alexander Nevsky that Catherine I of Russia had introduced on the 21st of May 1725. In 2008 he was voted the greatest Russian in the Name of Russia television poll.

  The name still serves war. In September 2022 an all-volunteer battalion tactical group supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine was named after him. Alexander Beglov, governor of Saint Petersburg, erected a statue of Nevsky in Mariupol after the city was devastated. In February 2024, his memorial was deleted from the synaxarion of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, where his exaltation had been used to justify the invasion.