Andrey Bogolyubsky

• 1. Introduction

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  On the night of the 28th to the 29th of June 1174, twenty boyars burst into the bedchamber of Andrey I Yuryevich Bogolyubsky and killed him in his bed. Andrey ruled Vladimir-Suzdal, a principality in the north of Rus', and history remembers him as Andrey Bogolyubsky. His killers were not foreign raiders. They belonged to the upper nobility he governed. What had Andrey done to turn his own nobles against him? How did a northern prince come to strike at Kiev itself? And why do two chronicles, a painted miniature and a set of exhumed bones disagree about the wounds on his body?

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• 2. Cuman Blood, Northern Throne

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  The Primary Chronicle records that on the 12th of January 1108 a marriage sealed a peace between the Rus' and the Cumans, also called the Polovtsi. The groom was Yuri Vladimirovich, Prince of Rostov and Suzdal, better known as Yuri Dolgoruki. He was a son of Volodimer II Monomakh, the forefather of the Monomakhovichi. The bride was an unnamed Cuman princess, a daughter of Aepa, son of Osen'. Their son Andrey was born around 1111, and Yuri made him a prince in Vyshgorod, a town near Kiev.

  In 1149 Andrey accompanied his father during a brief capture of Kiev, one episode in the repeated wars fought between the princely clans. By 1153 he was Prince of Murom-Ryazan.

  The year 1155 brought a sharper break. Andrey left Vyshgorod for Vladimir, a little town on the river Klyazma that had been founded in 1108. He took with him the Icon of the Blessed Mother of God, which afterward became known as the Virgin of Vladimir. The Kievan Chronicle condemned this as theft. The Suzdalian Chronicle passed no judgement at all.

  Yuri died in 1157. In 1162 Andrey drove his younger brothers Mikhail, called Mikhalko, and Vsevolod, called the Big Nest, out of Rostov and Suzdal. That united his father's lands under one ruler, a condition the sources call samovlastets. He sent four brothers into exile in the Byzantine Empire, together with their mother, who was Yuri's second wife. He also secured the right to collect tribute from the peoples of the Northern Dvina lands.

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• 3. Walls and Churches

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  In 1158 Andrey began raising fortifications around the town of Vladimir, and the work was finished in 1164. He also started the Dormition Cathedral there.

  His ambitions for the town reached as far as Constantinople. In 1162 or 1164 he sent an embassy asking for a separate metropolitan see in Vladimir. The patriarch of Constantinople overruled him.

  In that same year, 1164, Andrey attacked the Volga Bolgars and won a victory. A later tradition ties this campaign to the death of one of his sons, and to a famous church built in the son's memory.

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• 4. The Sack of Kiev

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  In March 1169 troops from the north sacked Kiev, devastating the city as never before. Andrey did not take part. He stayed in Vladimir-Suzdal while his son Mstislav, named by both the Kievan and Suzdalian chronicles, commanded the coalition that did the work. The army plundered the city. It stole much religious artwork, many books and other valuables, and it wrecked houses and religious buildings alike.

  Afterward Andrey claimed the title of Grand Prince, yet he kept his residence at Vladimir. He stressed the Byzantine religious heritage of Vladimir to assert its prestige and its ecclesiastical independence from Kiev.

  He placed his brother Gleb on the throne of Kiev, hoping to create a position of overlordship for himself. It lasted less than two years. Gleb died on the 20th of January 1171, and the arrangement died with him.

  Elsewhere in Rus', Andrey's ambitions met even less success, beginning with Novgorod.

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• 5. Reach Without Grip

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  The siege of Novgorod in 1170 was a failure, and the Suzdalians were defeated. Andrey turned to pressure instead of force. He blockaded the trade hub, and in 1171 this won the princehood of Novgorod for his son Yury Bogolyubsky. The Novgorodians expelled Yury as soon as Andrey died in June 1174.

  Gleb's death in 1171 sparked another Kievan succession crisis. Andrey was pulled into a two-year war to regain control of the city. The Rostislavichi of Smolensk and the Iziaslavichi of Volhynia jointly secured the Kievan throne. Andrey assembled a second coalition and marched on Vyshgorod in 1173. There the Yurievichi-Olgovichi forces of Suzdalia and Chernigov were utterly defeated.

  Not long afterward, Andrey was dead.

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• 6. The Missing Arm

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  The defeat at Vyshgorod, the growth of Andrey's princely authority and his quarrels with the boyars together produced a conspiracy. It ended in his murder.

  The Kievan Chronicle of the Hypatian Codex and the Radziwiłł Chronicle both name an assailant called Peter, who cut off the prince's right hand. In the Kievan telling, Andrey looked up to heaven and commended his spirit to the Lord. He was killed on a Saturday night.

  The miniature that accompanies the Radziwiłł Chronicle tells a different story. It shows the attackers cutting off his left arm.

  The bones side with the picture. When Andrey's body was exhumed in 1965, the researcher Rokhlin reported that he "found a lot of cut marks on the left humerus and forearm bones." In 2009 the Russian historian A.V. Artcikhovsky produced a special historical study that confirmed Rokhlin's observations.

  Andrey's death set off the Suzdalian war of succession, which ran from 1174 to 1177.

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• 7. Three Sons

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  The Kievan Chronicle reports that a son named Iziaslav was buried in the Dormition Cathedral of Vladimir on the 28th of October 1164. The Suzdalian Chronicle gives the year as 1165. Later traditions, reported by Janet Martin in 2007, link his death to the successful 1164 campaign against Volga Bulgaria. They add that Andrey commissioned the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl in 1165 to honor him.

  Several facts cast doubt on that story. No chronicle mentions the connection until the 16th century. The Nerl church could be as old as 1158. And the Suzdalian Chronicle says that Andrey's druzhina, which included Iziaslav, came through the battle "healthy."

  Mstislav, the son who led the army to Kiev, died on the 28th of March 1172 according to the Kievan Chronicle. That chronicle filed the entry under a year that corresponds to 1173. Janet Martin links his death to the ill-fated Suzdalian winter campaign of 1171-1172 against Volga Bulgaria.

  Yury Bogolyubsky, also called Iurii Andreevich, was born around 1160 and became Prince of Novgorod in 1171. He was briefly the husband of Queen Tamar of Georgia, until she divorced him in the years 1185-88.

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• 8. Memory and Sainthood

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  Two chronicles wrote eulogies for Andrey. Columns 367 to 369 of the Suzdalian Chronicle hold a short one. Columns 580 to 595 of the Kievan Chronicle hold a long one, known as the Tale About the Slaying of Andrej Bogoljubskij.

  Andrey built a castle at Bogolyubovo, near Vladimir, and it became his favorite residence. The ancient icon known as the Theotokos of Bogolyubovo was painted in the 12th century at his request.

  His victory over the Bulgars is still remembered each year at the Honey Feast of the Saviour.

  The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Andrey as a saint in 1702, more than five centuries after the night in his chambers.

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