The Republic of Novgorod

A prince put on trial

formationDrafted from Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914)

Novgorod was already old by 1136. The city on the Volkhov had been a princely seat for nearly three centuries, usually held by whichever son of the Kyivan grand prince was sent north to govern it, a training post for a young ruler on his way to a bigger throne elsewhere. What made 1136 different was not a new city or a new dynasty. It was a citizens' assembly deciding, for the first time, that a prince answered to it rather than the other way around.

The list of grievances

Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich had ruled Novgorod for years without much distinguishing himself, and in 1136 the citizens turned on him at once. They confined him under guard in the archbishop's own palace, with his wife, children and mother-in-law, and kept him there for close to two months while they drew up a formal case against him: he had neglected the poor, he had tried to seize the neighbouring principality of Pereyaslavl for himself instead of attending to Novgorod, and, worst of all in a city that lived by its army, he had fled the field at the first sign of battle against Suzdal the year before. When they finally released him, it was only to expel him from the city entirely.

Novgorod Museum, Veliky Novgorod · Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Alexander Sigachev · CC0

Not a revolution against princes as such

What happened next shows how limited the citizens' ambitions actually were. They did not abolish the princely office. They sent to Chernigov for a different prince and installed him in Vsevolod's place. What they had established was a precedent, not a new form of government fully worked out in a single year: a prince at Novgorod held his seat only for as long as the city's own citizens, gathered in the assembly the chronicle calls the veche, chose to let him keep it.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Vasily Khudiakov · Public domain

What that meant within a generation

The pattern set in 1136 repeated itself for the rest of the century. Princes arrived, ruled for months or a few years, and were sent away again whenever they lost the confidence of the assembly or of the wealthier merchant families who dominated it. One held the seat less than a year. Another lasted twenty-one months before his own retinue turned against him along with the city. In 1141 the citizens went nine months with no prince installed at all, ruling the city through their own elected officials in the meantime. A prince at Novgorod, from 1136 onward, led the city's armies and represented it abroad; he did not own the city the way a prince elsewhere in Rus' owned his patrimony.

The bell and the ledger

expansionDrafted from Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914)

Once a prince no longer owned Novgorod outright, something had to. What filled that place was an assembly summoned by the ringing of a bell hung above the marketplace, and a commercial network that reached from the Baltic to the Ural forests and gave the assembly something worth governing.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Unknown writer · Public domain

Who actually ran the city

The veche elected the posadnik, the chief civil officer, from among the city's leading families, and it was the posadnik rather than the prince who handled most of the business of governing between crises: negotiating with neighbouring powers, presiding over the assembly's own sessions, commanding alongside the prince in war. The office was also, by the chronicle's own repeated record, one of the most dangerous in the republic. Posadniks were driven out by mob violence or by rival factions in 1134, 1146, 1156, 1161, 1167, 1171, 1172, 1175, 1189, 1205 and 1209, and killed outright in several of those years - the 1209 riots in particular left the city convulsed for days.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Unknown artist · Public domain

An archbishop with a civil portfolio

Novgorod's archbishop held a second office beside his religious one, serving as a check on both prince and posadnik and, in later centuries, as the keeper of the city's treasury and a signatory to its treaties. The combination of an elected civil officer and a semi-independent ecclesiastical one, neither answerable to the prince, is what let the city survive the frequent and sometimes violent turnover in its princely seat without its actual administration collapsing along with it.

Furs, wax and a river system that reached two seas

None of this would have mattered if Novgorod's hinterland had not made it rich. Merchants operating out of the city drew furs, wax, honey and other northern produce from a territory stretching toward the White Sea and east into the Ural forests, and moved it down the same river networks that had once carried the whole Rus' federation's trade toward Byzantium and, increasingly as the twelfth century went on, toward the Baltic and the German trading towns growing along it. The city's wealth, not the prince it currently employed, was the actual constant across the volatile politics its own citizens practised on their princely appointees.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Apollinary Vasnetsov · Public domain

Two battles and a bow to the Horde

peakDrafted from Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914)

Alexander Iaroslavich was not yet twenty when Novgorod's citizens called on him to meet a Swedish force that had landed at the mouth of the Neva in 1240. He won decisively enough to be remembered ever after by the river's name, and two years later he broke the Livonian knightly order on the ice of Lake Peipus in a battle fought, by the chronicle's account, so that the retreating knights' own weight in armour dragged them under the breaking ice. Between the two victories Novgorod's western frontier was secured against both of the powers most likely to press it while Rus' to the south lay broken by the Mongol invasion of the same years.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The harder fight was diplomatic

Alexander's real distinction was what he did next. Rather than resist the Mongol demand for tribute and submission the way princes further south had already tried and failed to, he travelled to the Golden Horde and, once, all the way to the court of the Great Khan himself between 1246 and 1250, to secure Novgorod's position by accommodation rather than by a battle he judged unwinnable. The city that had just defeated two Western powers in open combat submitted to a third power in the east without a fight, on his advice, and kept both its wealth and its own internal government intact as a result.

A death that made him a saint

Alexander died in 1263 returning from another journey to negotiate with the Horde on the city's behalf. The city's own archbishop, Cyril, is recorded lamenting his death before the assembled clergy with the words "the sun of the Russian land has set." He was canonised centuries later as a saint of the Orthodox Church, but the more immediate legacy, within Novgorod itself, was the demonstration that the republic could preserve its own institutions under a foreign overlord's tribute as long as its prince knew when not to fight.

What Novgorod did not have to become

The accommodation Alexander negotiated meant Novgorod paid Mongol tribute alongside the rest of Rus' but was never occupied by a Mongol garrison and never lost the assembly, the posadnik or the archbishop's civil role that governed it day to day. The veche kept electing and expelling its own officials through two and a half centuries of nominal Mongol overlordship exactly as it had before 1240 - a continuity few other Rus' principalities of the period could claim.

The prince they would not shelter

contractionDrafted from Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914)

Between Alexander Nevsky's death and the Black Death, Novgorod's own chronicle records no single ruler and no single crisis worth a chapter on its own - only decades of small border wars, church-building, fires, and one moment when the republic's pragmatism was tested against a neighbouring prince's desperation, and pragmatism won.

Paying off an army rather than fighting one

In 1293 the Novgorodians learned the price of backing the wrong side in a Tatar succession quarrel. Prince Andrei had complained to the Horde against his own brother Dmitri, and the khan sent his brother Duden with an army that laid waste Vladimir, Moscow, Dmitrov and other towns before Novgorod's own envoys reached the Tatar camp at Volok with gifts and a direct request: turn the soldiers back. It worked. The pattern held for the rest of the period - Novgorod fought the Swedes and the German Order repeatedly along its own frontiers, burning a Swedish fort in the Korela land in 1295 and losing another skirmish to a spring thaw in 1293 - but treated the Horde itself as a danger to be paid off rather than resisted, a policy that kept Mongol armies out of the city's own walls for the whole period covered here.

A prince at the gate, refused

That same calculation was tested most sharply in 1327, when Alexander of Tver led a massacre of the Tatar envoy Shchelkan's retinue and touched off a Tatar-Muscovite punitive campaign that burned Tver, Kashin and the surrounding district to the ground. Alexander sent envoys to Novgorod asking for shelter. The city refused him. When the Tatar army's own envoys reached Novgorod afterward, the assembly paid two thousand silver grivnas rather than risk the same devastation Tver had just suffered - the same transactional logic that had worked against Duden's army thirty-four years earlier, applied now against an army that had just finished demonstrating exactly what refusal would cost.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A Muscovite on Novgorod's own throne

The prince who benefited from Tver's ruin was Ivan Kalita of Moscow, already assembling the reputation for shrewd accommodation with the Horde that would define his own dynasty. In March 1329 he was enthroned in Novgorod itself, with the princes of Tver's own defeated house attending alongside him - a reversal that put the city which had once sheltered Alexander Nevsky's line under a Muscovite prince within two years of refusing his rival shelter at its own gates.

None of this made Novgorod's own government or trade network the story of these decades - the chronicle spends as many lines on burned churches and rebuilt bridges as on princes - but the choices made in 1293 and 1327 show a republic already fluent in the calculation every later Novgorodian government would have to make again and again: which side of a quarrel between Rus' princes actually threatened the city, and how much silver it took to make sure it never found out the hard way.

The archbishop who never came home

contractionDrafted from Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914)

In 1352 the plague that had already devastated Western Europe reached Novgorod's own lands, and the chronicle's account of its arrival is one of the most vivid entries in the whole record. Pskov was struck first, badly enough that its own envoys begged Novgorod's archbishop, Vasili, to come and bless the stricken city in person. He went without delay, led a procession through Pskov with crosses, blessed its people church by church - and was taken ill on the road home, dying within days at a monastery on the Shelon river before he could reach his own cathedral again. Novgorod brought his body back and buried him in the porch of St. Sophia's; that same spring, Feognost, Metropolitan of all Russia, also died of the same sickness.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Alexxx1979 · CC BY-SA 4.0

"It passed over the face of all the land"

The plague did not spare the city that had already lost its own archbishop to it. The chronicle's own description of what followed reads less like an administrative record than a lament: death came suddenly and painfully, a man spitting blood and dead within three days, from Lady Day to Easter, "a countless number of good people" carried off. The chronicler is explicit that Novgorod was not singled out - "I believe it passed over the face of all the land" - framing the epidemic as a shared visitation on Rus' as a whole rather than a judgment on the city specifically, even as it emptied houses and overwhelmed the capacity of the living to bury the dead.

A blow the republic's institutions absorbed anyway

What the plague did not do was break Novgorod's own government. A new archbishop, Moisei, was installed within the same entries that record the epidemic's worst months, the veche and the posadnik's office continuing to function through a demographic catastrophe severe enough to kill the city's own senior churchman and Russia's own metropolitan within weeks of each other. It was one more test, alongside Mongol tribute and foreign princes, that Novgorod's republican institutions absorbed without themselves collapsing - even as the plague returned in later decades, a recurring visitation the city's own chronicle kept recording long after 1352 had passed.

A republic between two crowns

contractionDrafted from Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914)

For two centuries after Alexander Nevsky's death, Novgorod kept its own government while the wider Rus' world around it reorganised itself under Mongol tribute and, gradually, under the rising power of Moscow. The republic's problem, by the fifteenth century, was no longer the Horde. It was that it needed a prince from somewhere, and every candidate now belonged to one of two rival powers that both wanted Novgorod's wealth more than its independence.

A city that could no longer stay neutral

Moscow's grand princes increasingly treated the right to install a prince at Novgorod as their own prerogative rather than a request the city's assembly could refuse, backing their claim with the growing military weight that had already made Moscow the strongest of the former Mongol tributary principalities. Lithuania, whose grand dukes ruled a state that by then stretched deep into the old Rus' lands to the west, offered Novgorod's merchant elite an alternative patron with looser demands and closer trading ties to the Baltic ports the city depended on. Neither choice preserved what the city had actually built: a government answering to its own citizens rather than to a foreign court.

The assembly divides against itself

The veche's own internal politics hardened into something closer to open faction than the older pattern of expelling one unsatisfactory prince for another. By the mid-fifteenth century a pro-Muscovite party and a pro-Lithuanian party contested the city's actual foreign policy, each backed by different merchant families, and the choice was not a small one: Novgorod's neighbours to the south had already been absorbed one by one into the same Muscovite orbit the city was being asked to submit to, while the alternative meant subordinating an Orthodox city to a Catholic-ruled state.

Trade that no longer ran on Novgorod's own terms

The German Hanseatic merchants who had operated a trading post in the city for centuries increasingly set the terms of that trade rather than negotiating them, as Novgorod's own long internal preoccupation with the Moscow-or-Lithuania question left it with less leverage abroad than the republic had once commanded at the height of its river-borne wealth. A city whose whole institutional order had been built to manage a prince it could dismiss had no comparable tool for managing a foreign trading partner, or a foreign patron, it could not.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The widow who chose wrong

endDrafted from Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914)

The figure the chronicle blames for what happened in 1471 is a widow. Marfa Boretskaya, whose husband Isaac had held the posadnik's office before his death, led the faction within the assembly that pushed Novgorod toward Lithuania rather than Moscow, at the exact moment Ivan III of Moscow was running out of patience with the question.

A city debating its own extinction

The chronicle, in its introduction, frames 1471 as the year Novgorod had to decide, in plain terms, whether to be "frankly Muscovite or disloyally Polish" - the Lithuanian grand duke also held the Polish crown by then, so the pro-Lithuanian party's position was, from the Orthodox and pro-Muscovite side that ended up writing most of the surviving chronicle, indistinguishable from disloyalty to the faith along with the city. Marfa's faction pressed ahead regardless, and Ivan answered with an army.

The Shelon

Novgorod's own forces met Ivan's at the river Shelon and were defeated. The chronicle, by this point thoroughly sympathetic to Moscow's side of the story, records the citizens receiving their liberty back from Ivan afterward rather than losing it outright - a settlement, not a sack, and one that left the veche, the posadnik's office and the city's own administration formally intact under a prince who was now unambiguously the senior partner in the arrangement.

Seven years of a liberty already spent

The settlement did not hold. Renewed friction between the city and Moscow brought Ivan's army back in 1478, and this time there was no partial accommodation: the veche was abolished outright, and the assembly bell that had summoned Novgorod's citizens to session for three and a half centuries - the physical instrument of the government the city had built in 1136 - was taken down and carried off to Moscow. What ended at the Shelon was Novgorod's ability to choose its own foreign patron. What ended seven years later was the institution that had once been able to make that choice, or any other, at all.

Forbes, Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (1914) · Klavdy Lebedev · Public domain