Vladimir-Suzdal

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In 1169, the city of Kiev was sacked, and the order to do it came from the north. Andrey Bogolyubsky, a prince ruling from the forested lands beyond the river, sent his armies against the mother city of the Rus and broke its hold on power. Political weight began to shift away from the south toward a region known as Vladimir-Suzdal, also called Suzdalia. This was a medieval principality that took shape as Kievan Rus came apart. Historians often call its territory northeast Russia, or northeast Rus. Why did power drain from an ancient capital into a land of woods and small towns? How did a junior posting on a tributary of the Volga grow into the seedbed of a future Russian state? And what happened when riders from the steppe arrived and burned its cities? The answers run through princes, churches, and a long contest between two rival towns.

• 2. Forest And River

  ›

  Yaroslavl had been founded on the upper Volga by 1071, a marker of how slowly this northern country filled with people. The first known prince of Rostov appears in the Primary Chronicle under the year 988, a man named Yaroslav Vladimirovich, placed there by his father Vladimir I of Kiev. In 1024 a famine struck the area, and a revolt stirred up by pagan sorcerers was put down by Yaroslav himself.

  Control of the upper Volga river mattered because it carried trade between Volga Bulgaria to the east and Veliky Novgorod to the west. Intercepting that shipping for profit tempted the ruling family of Pereyaslavl, the Monomakhovichi, but it was risky. Seizing cargo provoked hostilities with both the Bulgars and the Novgorodians.

  The 1097 Council of Liubech confirmed Vladimir Monomakh's possession of Rostov and Suzdal. From that point the region became contested ground between the Monomakhovichi and the Sviatoslavichi of Murom. Across these early years the towns of Rostov, Suzdal and Murom remained junior postings, far from the center of Rus politics. That distance was about to close.

• 3. The Long-Armed Prince

  ›

  Yury Dolgoruky moved his capital from Rostov to Suzdal in 1125, after his father died, ruling a principality that had grown virtually independent. His sobriquet, the Long-Armed, pointed to his reach into the distant politics of Kiev. By about 1108 this sixth son of Monomakh, living in the town of Suzdal, held Rostov as its prince.

  In 1107 the Volga Bulgars raided, and Yury answered. He is said to have founded the fortified outpost of Vladimir on the Klyazma to guard that river, a town strengthened and rebuilt around 1108 roughly 31 km south of Suzdal. In 1120 he led a campaign into Bulgar territory.

  During the 11th and 12th centuries, Turkic nomads raided the southern parts of Rus, and people fled north into the wooded country called Zalesye. New settlements rose there, and chronicle or popular legend credits Yury with founding Pereslavl, Kostroma, Dmitrov, Moscow, Yuriev-Polsky, Uglich, Tver, Dubna, and many more. In the Suzdal-Ryazan war of 1146, his strengthened principality conquered the Ryazan Principality. In the 1150s he occupied Kiev more than once.

• 4. White Stone And Murder

  ›

  Andrey Bogolyubsky treated the nearby princely states with contempt, driving out his brothers and cousins and seizing all their lands by 1162. He united his father's patrimony under his sole rule, a position described by the term samovlastets. When grand prince Rostislav I of Kiev died in 1167, a succession crisis broke out, and Andrey pressed the claim of his brother Gleb.

  Gleb's death in 1171 brought a fresh crisis, and the Suzdalians were thrown out of Kiev. Andrey gathered another coalition to retake the capital but met total defeat in the Siege of Vyshgorod in 1173. The alliance dissolved. Months later, in 1174, his own boyars murdered the prince at his suburban residence at Bogolyubovo.

  Andrey embellished his city with white stone churches and monasteries, inviting architects from, in his phrasing, all over the world. The Church of Pokrova na Nerli became a famous architectural masterpiece of Vladimir and a symbol of Suzdalia's cultural originality. These cathedrals blended the Byzantine cruciform plan and cupolas with Roman whitestone construction and decorative technique, a mixture of Greek and Western European traditions. The famous Theotokos of Vladimir, an icon of the Virgin Mary, was moved to the city in this era.

• 5. Tribute And Ash

  ›

  The Mongol hordes under Batu Khan took and burned Vladimir in 1238, then went on to devastate the principality's other major cities during the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus. The ruler at that moment was George, son of Vsevolod III, a shrewd prince who had decisively defeated Volga Bulgaria and installed his brother Yaroslav in Novgorod. He had reached the capital only after a six-year struggle with his brother Konstantin, who held the support of Rostovan boyars and Mstislav the Bold of Kiev.

  Yury II was killed during the Mongol invasions of 1237 to 1238, and his younger brother Yaroslav II, along with the other princes, submitted to Mongol rule. Vladimir became a vassal of the Mongol Empire, later succeeded by the Golden Horde, with the Grand Prince appointed by the Great Khan. Even the popular Alexander Nevsky of Pereslavl had to travel to the Khan's capital at Karakorum to be installed as Grand Prince in Vladimir.

  Mongol rule also brought wealth, since Vladimir could reach the Mongols' lucrative patronage of oriental trade. None of the cities, though, regained the power of Kievan Rus. The principality splintered into eleven tiny states: Moscow, Tver, Pereslavl, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Uglich, Belozersk, Kostroma, Nizhny Novgorod, Starodub-upon-Klyazma, and Yuriev-Polsky. Mongol rule imposed a principle of universal subordination and undivided authority, very different from the patterns of Western Europe.

• 6. Moscow And Tver

  ›

  By the end of the 13th century, only three cities still contended for the title of Grand Prince of Vladimir: Moscow, Tver, and Nizhny Novgorod. Once installed, they chose to stay in their own cities rather than move to Vladimir. The grand principality had by then fragmented into over a dozen appanages.

  Metropolitan Peter of Kiev and all Rus moved his chair from Vladimir to Moscow, a decision dated to 1325 in one account and 1324 in another, and it signaled Moscow's rising prominence. Maximus had earlier moved the residence from Kiev to Vladimir in 1299. When the Tver Uprising of 1327 broke out, forces of Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod helped the Mongols crush it.

  From 1331 the prince of Moscow was also the grand prince of Vladimir, with one break from 1359 to 1363, when Nizhny Novgorod held the throne during the minority of Dmitry Donskoy. By the end of the 1330s Moscow had eclipsed Tver, which sank into wars among its own appanages, particularly between Kashin and Mikulin. Since 1394 Moscow effectively inherited the title and controlled Vladimir thereafter. In 1389 the grand principality had become a family possession of the prince of Moscow, uniting the two thrones.

• 7. Brush And Monastery

  ›

  In 1380, Dmitry Donskoy and his army dealt the first serious blow to the Golden Horde. Sergii Radonezhsky, founder and hegumen of the Troitse-Sergiyev monastery, played an exceptional role in that victory, and he became the protector and patron of Muscovy. He and his followers founded more than two hundred monasteries, the basis of a monastic colonization of the little-developed northern lands. The Life of Sergii Radonezhsky was written by Epifaniy the Wise, one of the outstanding writers of that time.

  In the early fifteenth century, Andrei Rublev and Prokhor of Gorodets painted the Assumption, or Uspensky, Cathedral. In the mid-1450s they restored the Cathedral of St. George in Yuriev-Polsky under the supervision of Vasili Dmitriyevich Yermolin. Early Muscovite architecture inherited whitestone construction and the typology of four-pillar cathedrals from Vladimir, while art historians note influences from the Balkans and European Gothic.

  Two painters shaped Russian art of this period. The Byzantine artist Feofan Grek worked in a monochromatic palette, with laconic blots and lines tied to the doctrine of hesychasm from Byzantium. Andrei Rublev painted in softer colors, closer to late Byzantine work in the Balkans, and he created his Trinity, the greatest masterpiece of the Russian Middle Ages, for the cathedral of Sergii's monastery.

• 8. Birth Of A State

  ›

  Vladimir became a model for Muscovy, and the princes of Moscow emphasized their succession by caring for its sacred places. In the late fourteenth century the icon of the Theotokos of Vladimir, the principal object of worship of the old capital, was transferred to Moscow. Vladimir, by contrast, had become a border fortress within the lands it once led.

  Mid-fifteenth-century Muscovy is known for bloody internecine wars over the Moscow seat of the Grand Prince. Ivan III united the Russian lands around Moscow by the end of the fifteenth century, at the cost of ravaging Novgorod and Pskov. He ended Russia's subordination to the Golden Horde after the Great standing on the Ugra river in 1480, a river later poetically called the Virgin Belt, or Poyas Bogoroditsy.

  The original territory of the grand principality became the core of the centralized Russian state. Its old polities did not vanish from memory. Up to 1917, the Grand Princes of Moscow, and later the Russian Tsars and Emperors, were styled as rulers of historical lands including Vladimir and Rostov. In the Latin versions of those titles, the old principalities appeared as Vladimiria and Rostovia.