Vladimir-Suzdal

A prince who ruled from the wrong city

formationDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

When Yuri Dolgoruki died in 1157, the two senior towns of his own province, Rostov and Suzdal, had sworn to honor his wish that the land pass to his younger sons after him. They broke that oath within days and invited his eldest son, Andrei, to take power instead - and Andrei, for all his father's memory, did not hesitate to accept an offer sworn against his own younger brothers. He then drove those same brothers and their sons out of the country as potential rivals, refusing to share the province with kin the way custom expected.

A capital chosen for what it lacked

What Andrei did next mattered more than how he had come to power. Rostov and Suzdal each had its own vietche, the town assembly that had, for generations, ruled alongside its prince rather than simply beneath him. Andrei had no love for either town, or for the assembly tradition both towns represented, and instead made his home at Vladimir on the Klyazma - a lesser settlement with no assembly of its own to answer to. There he built without needing anyone's consent: a magnificent Cathedral of the Assumption, fortifications, and a town grand enough, in time, that the chronicle records him taking real pride in the work. Rostov and Suzdal's own citizens were not pleased. "Behold," they complained, "we are the capital towns, whereas Vladimir is but a suburb."

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Mike1979 Russia · CC BY-SA 4.0

A title claimed without the city it belonged to

Andrei's ambitions reached further than his own province. He proclaimed himself Suzerain Prince of all the Russian land - the title that had, without exception, gone with the throne of Kiev - while staying exactly where he was, in Vladimir. It was an arrangement nobody had attempted before: a senior ruler content to remain, by choice, in what custom treated as a junior posting. In doing so, Andrei split what had been a single, unified Suzerain principality into two - a real one at Vladimir, and Kiev's own throne reduced to a subordinate seat he allowed lesser princes to occupy at his own pleasure.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Alexxx1979 · CC BY-SA 3.0

A ruler undone by the same will that built him

The same refusal to share power that let Andrei break with Kievan precedent eventually cost him his life. He excluded his senior boyars from his own court as thoroughly as he had excluded his brothers from the province, and when he had a boyar named Kuchkovich executed, the dead man's own brother joined a conspiracy that assassinated Andrei in 1174. "Though prudent in all things and valiant," the chronicle concluded of him, "Prince Andrei did undo his own purposes with his own intemperateness." He left behind a capital his own family had not chosen and a title no longer tied to the city that had always defined it - the two conditions that would let his successors turn Vladimir into something considerably larger than the "suburb" Rostov and Suzdal once mocked it as.

Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg · Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Suzdal's iron hand

peakDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

Vsevolod III took power in 1176 by defeating his own nephew, and over the thirty-six years that followed he pushed the arrangement his brother Andrei had improvised - a Suzerain title held from Vladimir rather than Kiev - into something close to outright supremacy over the whole of Rus. Like Andrei, he enforced recognition of his own seniority without ever traveling south to occupy Kiev's throne in person, permitting the princes who sat there to hold it only as his own subordinates, "underlings" ruling on his sufferance rather than by independent right.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Anton Skrobotov · CC BY 2.0

Princes who answered to a ruler two hundred miles away

The reach of Vsevolod's authority astonished contemporaries. Rurik of Smolensk, one of the underling Suzerains Vsevolod allowed to sit at Kiev, told his own father-in-law plainly: "Thou thyself knowest that the will of Vsevolod must be obeyed, and that without it we can do nothing." Far to the south-west, in Galicia, a prince who had just taken his father's throne with Polish help lost no time sending word to Vladimir pledging his province and himself to Vsevolod "for ever." Even the princes of Riazan, closer neighbors accustomed to a measure of independence, found themselves supplying troops to Suzdal's campaigns whenever ordered to.

A rebellious province burned to make the point stick

When Riazan's own princes were caught intriguing against him in 1207, Vsevolod had them seized outright and brought to Vladimir, installing his own officials in their towns and holding the captured princes and their families until his death. When the town of Riazan itself later defied him by banishing his own son, Vsevolod's response left no room for further defiance: the entire population, together with their bishop, was deported to other towns, and Riazan itself was burned to the ground. The message was not subtle, and it did not need to be repeated.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A name that traveled south on its own

Vsevolod's authority was felt as far as it was feared. The chronicle records that his very name "made all lands to quake," and even a South Russian poet writing in the same generation - the author of the Tale of Igor's Campaign - invoked Vsevolod directly in a passage lamenting Rus's military weakness elsewhere, addressing him as a power capable of "dividing the waters of the Volga with thine oars." By the century's turn, a principality that a hundred years earlier had been a remote, half-colonized frontier had become the dominant power in the Russian land - and the political center of gravity had shifted, in the space of two reigns, from the banks of the Dnieper to the banks of the Klyazma.

A throne without a rota

contractionDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

The old system that had governed succession across the whole Rurikid clan - a rota in which provinces passed between princes in strict order of collective seniority, so that no single family line could treat any territory as its own permanent property - broke down decisively under Vsevolod III, and it broke down by his own hand. Shortly before his death, Vsevolod fell out with his eldest son, Constantine, and simply transferred Constantine's own right of succession to his second son, Yuri - a personal act of designation that had no place in the old system at all. Succession to Vladimir's own throne, from this point forward, was something a reigning prince could grant or withhold at his own discretion, not a birthright automatically due to whoever stood next in line.

A family, and then twelve families

The consequences compounded across two generations. On Vsevolod's death, his own territory was divided among his five sons, carving four new appanages - Rostov, Pereiaslavl, Yuriev, and Starodub - out of the senior principality's original bulk. When Vsevolod's grandsons in turn inherited their fathers' shares, the subdivision went further still: three more appanages, Suzdal, Kostroma, and Moscow, were cut from Vladimir's own portion; Rostov split into Yaroslavl and Uglich; Pereiaslavl split into Tver and Dmitrov-Galich. A territory Vsevolod had ruled as five undivided shares under his own sons had become twelve separate, independently held fragments under his grandsons - among them the two appanages, Moscow and Tver, whose own rivalry would eventually decide who inherited the whole arrangement.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 3.0

A feud that outlived the ruler who started it

Vsevolod's own succession maneuver produced immediate conflict rather than the stability he presumably intended. His disinherited eldest son, Constantine, found an ally in Mstislav the Bold, and the two went to war against Yuri over exactly the substitution their father had ordered. The dispute that followed - waged between brothers over an inheritance their own father had personally redirected - previewed, in miniature, the kind of fratricidal contest that would recur across the fragmented Vsevolod line for the whole of the following century, right up to the moment Moscow finally ended the pattern by winning outright rather than dividing further.

Vladimir burns

contractionDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

The fragmentation Vsevolod's own succession had set in motion was still working itself out among his grandsons when a catastrophe arrived that made the whole internal quarrel largely academic. A Mongol army under Batu destroyed Vladimir in 1238, burning the capital Andrei Bogolyubsky had built up from nothing eighty years earlier. The senior lines of Vsevolod's own descendants did not merely lose ground in the invasion - the sons of his two eldest sons, Constantine and Yuri, fell in battle against the Mongols outright, wiping out the branches of the family that would ordinarily have stood first in line for the throne.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A title that outlasted the capital it named

With the senior lines gone, the Suzerain throne passed to the sons of Vsevolod's third son, Yaroslav - first to the eldest, Alexander Nevsky, whose own name would become the most celebrated to hold the title in the century after Vladimir's destruction. Succession continued, in remarkably orderly fashion given everything the principality had just survived, through Yaroslav's remaining sons in turn: to a second son banished by the Mongols before he could take his place, then to a third son who held the appanage of Tver, and finally, by 1276, to the youngest, ruling from Kostroma. That the old order of seniority survived recognizably intact through four brothers, even after the capital itself had been burned and the senior lines annihilated, says something about how deeply the succession customs Vsevolod had once bent to his own purposes were still, in their basic outline, respected by what remained of his family.

A throne without a capital worth ruling from

What the Mongol destruction did not do was restore Vladimir's own practical importance. The throne's prestige survived 1238 more or less intact - princes still competed for it, and holding it still meant something

• but the city itself never regained the standing Andrei and Vsevolod had built for it. For the rest of the thirteenth century, the Suzerain title functioned increasingly as a prize to be won rather than a seat to actually govern from, and the appanage princes competing for it were, by then, looking as much to the favor of a foreign khan as to any claim rooted in Vladimir itself.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Mike1979 Russia · CC BY-SA 4.0

A throne money could buy

endDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

By the early fourteenth century, the contest for the Suzerain throne had narrowed to two junior branches of Vsevolod's own line: the princes of Moscow, an appanage so minor it had not even existed as a separate holding under Vsevolod's own sons, and the princes of Tver, carved from the old appanage of Pereiaslavl and considerably better placed by seniority and reputation alike. On paper, Tver's claim was the stronger one. In practice, the two branches went about pursuing the throne in almost opposite ways, and only one of those ways actually worked.

Valor against cunning

Tver's princes met the situation as men still holding to an older idea of what a Rus prince owed his own people. Early in the century, Alexander of Tver urged his fellow princes to stand together against Tartar demands rather than submit to them - counsel he gave from hiding at Pskov, having just joined his own citizens of Tver in massacring a party of Mongol emissaries sent to the city. Moscow's princes never entertained anything like open resistance. They saw, correctly, that the Horde could be managed far more reliably through steady tribute and flattery than through defiance, and Ivan Kalita in particular made himself a fixture at the Khan's own court - never arriving without gifts, and consequently never leaving without favor.

A punishment carried out with total thoroughness

That favor turned decisive when the Khan entrusted Kalita with punishing Tver for its own resistance. Kalita executed the assignment so completely that he and his Tartar allies "made all the Russian land desolate," in the chronicle's own words - laying Tver's entire principality waste while leaving Moscow itself, conspicuously, untouched. Michael of Tver, executed at the Horde not long after in a dispute Moscow's own princes had helped provoke, was returned to Rus as a mutilated corpse thrown down naked before his rival's tent - a detail the chronicle records as shocking even the Tartars present, whatever it said about the state of feeling among the Rus princes themselves by then.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A reward that never went back

For carrying out Tver's punishment so thoroughly, Kalita received the Suzerain throne of Rus in 1328 - and from that year forward, the title never left Moscow's hands again. The Khans, satisfied that a Muscovite Suzerain could keep the tribute flowing without requiring further Tartar intervention, largely stopped raiding Northern Rus directly for the next forty years, a peace the chronicle credited entirely to Moscow's own new standing. Vladimir's own name survived as the formal seat of the Suzerain title for a while longer, a courtesy attached to whichever prince of Moscow happened to hold it. The independent principality that Andrei Bogolyubsky had built out of a lesser town with no assembly to answer to, and that Vsevolod III had made the terror of every neighboring prince, ended not in conquest or in a single battle, but in a rival branch of its own family discovering that the Horde could be bought more cheaply than it could be resisted.