Principality of Tver

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Principality of Tver once stood as Moscow's most formidable rival for control of the Russian lands. In 1371, its prince was the last ruler outside Moscow ever to hold the title of grand prince of Vladimir, the most coveted seat of authority in northeastern Rus'. Yet by 1485, Tver had been swallowed entirely by the Muscovite state it had spent more than a century trying to outrun. How did a principality that weathered Mongol raids, captured the khan's own sister, and forged alliances from Lithuania to the Golden Horde end up as an appanage gift to a prince's son? The answers lie in the decisions of warlords, the deaths of rulers in distant courts, and one disastrous uprising that the city never recovered from.

• 2. A City Given Away

  ›

  In the 1230s or 1240s, Yaroslav Vsevolodovich, the grand prince of Vladimir, detached the city of Tver from the Pereyaslavl-Zalessky principality and gave it to his son Alexander, known to history as Nevsky. That transfer was a matter of administrative convenience, not a founding moment. The true founding came in 1246, when another of Yaroslav's sons, Yaroslav Yaroslavich, became the first prince of an independent Tver. The same family line held that throne until the principality ceased to exist.

  The Mongol invasion of 1237-1241 had burned through northeastern Rus', devastating cities like Vladimir on the Klyazma and Ryazan. Tver sat in a region where depopulation proved less severe. People driven from more war-torn areas arrived in Tver and Moscow alike, and both cities grew during the early years of Golden Horde domination. That population growth gave Tver a foundation its rivals lacked.

  The city also benefited from geography. Perched on the Upper Volga, it sat along the route that traders used to move luxury goods from the far north toward Sarai, the Jochid capital. Tver was one of the first cities in northeastern Rus' to launch major construction after the invasion, raising the Transfiguration Church in the late 13th century. A bishopric was founded during the reign of Yaroslav Yaroslavich, before his death in 1271, giving the principality religious standing to match its growing trade presence.

• 3. The Khan's Sister

  ›

  In 1285, Mikhail of Tver succeeded his father Yaroslav and began building Tver into a genuine power. By 1305, he had also secured the title of grand prince of Vladimir, making him the preeminent ruler in the region. That strength alarmed Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde, who decided to back Moscow as a counterweight.

  The confrontation came to a head in 1317, when Yuri Danilovich of Moscow, supported by Ozbeg, led a military campaign against Mikhail. The two forces met at a small village called Bortenevo. Mikhail won. In the course of that battle, Ozbeg's own sister, Konchaka, who was also Yuri's wife, was taken prisoner by Mikhail's forces.

  Konchaka died in captivity in Tver. Yuri used her death to paint Mikhail as responsible for killing the khan's sister. Mikhail was summoned to the Golden Horde to stand trial. He spent a month under imprisonment and torture before being executed there in 1318. The pattern did not end with him. His son Dmitry was executed at the Golden Horde in 1326. Another son, Aleksandr Mikhailovich, was executed there in 1339, along with Aleksandr's own son Fyodor. Three generations of Tver's ruling family died at the hands of the Horde within roughly two decades.

• 4. The Uprising That Broke Tver

  ›

  In 1327, the people of Tver rose against Tatar rule. The uprising was suppressed. The city was burned to the ground, and the principality lost a considerable portion of its population. That single event reshaped the balance of power in northeastern Rus' for the next century and a half.

  Tver never recovered from the destruction. Ivan I of Moscow, who had cooperated with the Tatars, was granted the title of grand prince of Vladimir not long after. Moscow absorbed surrounding principalities while remaining on good terms with the Horde. In a further blow to Tver's standing, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church relocated to Moscow, making it the spiritual center of Russian Orthodoxy as well as the political one.

  By the mid-14th century, Tver's princes were parceling out their own territory as appanages, creating a web of smaller dependent principalities. Several of these eventually grew independent enough to wage war against Tver itself. The sub-principalities around Kashin, Kholm, Klin, Mikulin, Telyatyevo, and Zubtsov all emerged from this fragmentation. Inter-princely wars between the appanages of Kashin and Mikulin broke out in the 1340s and 1350s. The appanage prince of Mikulin, Mikhail Alexandrovich, eventually won those conflicts and reunified the realm, ruling as Mikhail II of Tver.

• 5. The Lithuanian Gamble

  ›

  Mikhail II of Tver ruled during what is now called the Great Troubles, the period from 1359 to 1381 when the Golden Horde tore itself apart in a succession war. That internal collapse gave other powers room to maneuver. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Algirdas scored a major victory at the Battle of Blue Waters in 1362 or 1363, pushing deep into former Horde territory. Tver saw an opening and sided with Lithuania against Moscow in the Lithuanian-Muscovite War of 1368-1372.

  In 1371, Mikhail II received the title of grand prince of Vladimir, the last time any prince of Tver would ever hold it. Scholars generally treat his reign as the final period when Tver could genuinely challenge both Moscow and the Horde. When Algirdas made peace with Moscow and withdrew in 1372, Mikhail shifted toward the Mongol warlord Mamai. In 1375, Mamai granted Mikhail II the yarlik, or patent, of grand prince of Vladimir. But Moscow was not willing to let that stand. A Muscovite-led expedition besieged Tver for four weeks that same year. Mikhail signed a treaty acknowledging Dmitry Donskoy as his elder brother and the rightful grand prince of Vladimir, and he pledged military support in future conflicts.

  That pledge went unfulfilled. When Dmitry Donskoy assembled his coalition against Mamai and won the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, no troops from Tver joined the fight. The symbolic weight of Kulikovo proved short-lived anyway. Tokhtamysh defeated and killed Mamai at the Battle of the Kalka River in 1381, then besieged and sacked Moscow in 1382. Faced with that violence, Tver's princes, along with those of Nizhny Novgorod and others, submitted quickly to Tokhtamysh. Moscow itself submitted too. Coins minted by Dmitry after 1382 bore the inscription "Grand Prince Dimitry Ivanovich" on one face and "Sultan Tokhtamysh: Long may he live" on the other. Even after Kulikovo and the sack, Moscow could not yet command Tver, Nizhny Novgorod, the Novgorod Republic, or Ryazan.

• 6. Aspirations and Annexation

  ›

  In the early 15th century, Tver aligned itself with Lithuania, then at the height of its power under Vytautas. Boris of Tver entered an alliance with Vytautas in 1427. A text from that era, the pokhval'noe slovo, or word of praise, attributed to a monk named Foma, has drawn sustained scholarly attention. Some scholars read it as evidence that Tver harbored the same ambitions as Moscow to claim the inheritance of the Byzantine Empire and to be the unifying center of all the Russian lands.

  The historian Charles Halperin reads the text differently. He argues that Foma was not positioning Tver as Constantinople's successor, and was not claiming the mantle of the Russian land for Tver. In his reading, Foma treated the Tverian land and the Muscovite land as equals, and quietly challenged the assumption embedded in Muscovite texts that Moscow and the Russian land were one and the same thing. The debate turns on a passage from the Council of Florence, where Muscovite chronicles defined the Russian land as the territory ruled by Vasily II.

  The argument over texts became irrelevant to the outcome. During the Muscovite War of Succession from 1425 to 1453, Tver, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Ryazan, Novgorod, and Pskov all remained independent of Moscow and largely allied with Lithuania. But Moscow had more territory and more resources than any of the northeastern principalities by 1425, and steadily converted those advantages. In the 1470s, Mikhail III of Tver was forced to sign a series of treaties with Ivan III that systematically disadvantaged Tver. When Mikhail III reached out to Lithuania to compensate for what those treaties had cost him, Ivan III's army moved swiftly. It conquered Tver in 1485. The principality that had begun with Yaroslav Yaroslavich in 1246 was formally abolished. Ivan III gave Tver to his son Ivan the Young as an appanage, the same kind of subordinate grant that Tver's own princes had once used to manage their territory.