After Iaroslav’s death more disputes arose, but unity was soon restored and persisted throughout the reign of Iaroslav’s grandson Vladimir Monomakh (1113–1125) and his son Mstislav (1125–1132). In the middle of the twelfth century several centers of power began to emerge, although Kiev itself and the land around it were in decline. The city and title of Grand Prince of Kiev became the prize for contending regional powers. In the northeast, the core of the later Russia, the principality of Vladimir emerged as the main power, and in 1169 its ruler prince, Andrei Bogoliubsky, sacked Kiev and took the title of Grand Prince of Kiev. He fell victim to a conspiracy of his own boyars in 1174. Through Andrei’s brother Vsevolod (1176–1212) the Vladimir dynasty would rule the northeast for the next several centuries. For the time being, their attention was elsewhere, for the Vladimir princes had rivals in the west and south, especially in Galich near the Polish border. The territories of Kiev Rus were growing apart.
The increasing vitality of local centers also produced a town unique in Russian medieval history, Novgorod. Novgorod had been the second center of Kiev Rus, legendarily the first stop of the Viking dynasty. It was an important city that traded in the Baltic in the eleventh century, and its wealth was reflected in the Novgorod cathedral of Saint Sophia, built around 1050. Early Novgorod was a typical princely city, and the Kiev princes often sent their eldest sons to rule in their names. In the twelfth century, however, Novgorod set out on its own path. The Novgorodians expelled their prince in 1136 and chose another. From that moment on, they treated the prince as an elected general rather than a ruler. Before 1136 the princes had appointed a deputy with the title of posadnik, and now the popular assembly, the veche, elected the posadnik from among the boyars of the town. In 1156 the people even elected the archbishop, choosing from among three candidates proposed by the local clergy. This practice was contrary to Byzantine canon law, but the metropolitan of Kiev never challenged it.
Thus Novgorod developed into a unique polity among the princely states of medieval Rus. Novgorod was not a commercial republic, such as medieval Florence or the Flemish cities, for it was not merchants, bankers, and cloth manufacturers who sat in the city’s council. Merchants and artisans in Novgorod remained humble folk, present in the veche but with little real influence. The city’s elite consisted of boyars, rich landholders with large houses in the town and extensive possessions in the surrounding countryside. Many of the richest also controlled the northern forests, for it was the forests that were the real source of Novgorod’s wealth. After 1200 the Novgorodians ceased to travel west with their goods, as the league of north German trading cities, the Hansa, had come to dominate the trade of all countries around the Baltic Sea. The Germans journeyed to Novgorod to buy furs, beeswax for candles, and other forest products. The furs ranged from simple squirrel skins to the sables of the northern forests that fetched high prices in the west. In return, the Novgorodians bought Flemish and English cloth and a host of smaller items from the western towns.
By 1200 Kiev Rus was a single state in name only; the ruler of Kiev itself was either an outsider or a minor princeling. Other than Novgorod, each territory had a local princely dynasty springing from the old Kiev dynasty of the Rurikovichi. Because Kiev Rus did not know primogeniture, each of a prince’s sons had to be provided for, and in any case the eldest uncle could also be considered the rightful ruler. Thus, innumerable small principalities emerged, though at the same time several regional centers of power – Vladimir, Smolensk, Chernigov, and Galich – maintained control over lesser princes. These were agrarian societies, each with a small boyar elite that ruled the peasants and advised the prince, though some of the towns, especially Smolensk, had wider commercial ties. The towns were becoming wealthier, for in the regional centers like Vladimir, magnificent stone churches arose and monasteries with stone churches and walls were also founded near the towns. Builders and icon painters came from Byzantium, and the Rus people began to learn their skills.
Figure 1. The Twelfth Century Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir (c. 1900).
Byzantine contacts were easy, for the one single institution remaining was the church. As Metropolitan of Kiev, a Greek usually headed the church that oversaw the whole breadth of the land. The Greek clergy and the priests and monks of the Rus had their hands full with the Christianization of the people and the creation of a new culture that went with the new religion. The Christianization of the people went slowly, and outside of the towns there were few churches. While Kiev rapidly became a major center of the new faith, provincial towns still celebrated burials in which warriors were put to rest with their weapons, horses, slaves, and food for their journeys to the other world. In 1071 there was a wave of incidents of revolt and resistance led by pagan priests in Novgorod and in some of the towns of the northeast. In these circumstances the clergy concentrated on very basic issues. From a series of questions put to the mid-twelfth century bishop Nifont of Novgorod, we know some of these concerns. The clergy tried to enforce the rules of Christian marriage (that dictated which cousins could be married to each other) and rules governing sexual behavior. Many of these questions were about timing, that is, if intercourse between man and wife was proper during Lent or when it was proper for priests. Ritual purity for both clergy and laity figured more largely than sex itself. Which animals were “clean” and which not and the prohibition on eating the meat of strangled animals were prominent issues in these questions. For all of the various sins, the punishments were denial of communion and penance for greater or longer periods. The exposition of Christian doctrine to the laity remained on a very elementary level.
Even Christian works in this situation retained pre-Christian elements. The Primary Chronicle, the work of Christian monks, denounced the pagan customs of the early people of Rus but in the same pages glorified its pre-Christian rulers, recounting stories like the death of Oleg without comments. The princes of the ruling dynasty were generally known by their pagan names until about 1200. For most princes we do not even know the baptismal names. At the very end of the Kievan period, the Igor Tale, a brief story of an unsuccessful raid on the Kipchaks, called the Rus the children of Dazhbog, the sun god, but ends with praise of the princes and warriors who fought for the Christians against the pagans. The old ways had power almost to the end of Kiev Rus.
The new culture that came with Christianity brought with it writing and various types of Byzantine devotional literature. The most widely disseminated, and anchored in the liturgy (and thus open to the illiterate) were the lives of the saints. Alongside the lives of the Byzantine saints, Rus itself very quickly began to glorify its own holy men, and these works more than any other give some insight into the religious world of Kiev Rus.
The first saints were Princes Boris and Gleb, younger sons of Vladimir murdered in 1015 by their brother Sviatopolk “the Cursed” during the succession struggle after the death of Vladimir. By the end of the eleventh century, the two brothers were the objects of reverence and their bodies moved to a shrine near Kiev. Commemoration of the brothers began to appear in the liturgy, and the monk Nestor of the Caves Monastery wrote an account of their lives and death. Boris and Gleb were unlikely Christian saints. Though they led a blameless life and died young, it was their death that made them saints, but they were not martyrs for the faith. Sviatopolk was not challenging Christianity, merely eliminating potential rivals in a political struggle. The message of Nestor’s text is the humility and meekness of the two boys, the wickedness of their murderer, and by implication, the need for harmony and virtue in the ruling dynasty.