THE power of the princes of Novgorod was very limited, and their reign depended entirely on the will of the people.
The supreme power was vested in the Veche, which was a public meeting or council, summoned by a bell and held in the big square.* It was attended by all the inhabitants of Novgorod, both boyars and commoners, and decided all matters of importance.* The Veche had the power to elect or depose the prince,* declare war, judge criminals, elect all municipal officers the chief of whom was called the posadnik* and even to designate three candidates for the archbishopric. The names of these three candidates were written down, and the scrolls placed on the high altar of the Church of St Sophia, and a blind man or a small boy was sent to take two away. The candidate whose name remained on the altar then became archbishop.*
Novgorod became a most rich and powerful town, and was usually spoken of as the Lord Great Novgorod.*
abridged
* This was the square in front the Cathedral of St Sophia (Holy Wisdom), which dated back to the eleventh century.
* In fact about the only thing that the Veche could not do was control the city’s trade. As in London, that was in the hands of the Hanseatic League, which in practice meant Germans from Lübeck and Swedes from Visby, who from 1346 were installed as Aldermen in the Peterhof trading yard not by the Veche or by lot but by far-off Hanse bureaucrats.
* A viceroy or vicegerent.
* A frequent expression in the Chronicle of Novgorod is of this sort, “The men of Novgorod having taken counsel showed Knyaz [Prince] Roman the road”. This example dates to 1170; a good many other princes were ‘shown the road’, sometimes more than one in a year. Posadniks came and went at the whim of the Veche too, though it was the lucky one who was merely shown the road.
* Some Orthodox Churches still use election by lot for certain posts. In February 2021 the new Patriarch of Serbia, Porfirije, was elected in a similar manner. It is known as an Apostolic election, from the election of Matthias in Acts 1:24-26.
* Great Novgorod in Russian is Veliky Novgorod, and this is now the official name in order to distinguish the city from Nizhny Novgorod, some 250 miles east of Moscow.