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While the besieged citizens of Novgorod huddled for protection in the city gaol, Archbishop John remained in his cathedral to pray.
After the death of his father Yuri Dolgoruky, Prince of Kiev, in 1157, Andrey Bogolubsky, Prince of Vladimir, Rostov and Suzdal, began to pursue his dream of ruling all Rus’. He drove Prince Mstislav II from Kiev in 1169, and in February 1170 a little matter of unpaid tribute gave him an excuse to besiege Mstislav’s son Roman in the historic city of Veliky Novgorod.
Flemish merchants hoping to prosper in Russia’s commercial capital received a nasty shock.
In 1553, Richard Chancellor led an expedition to see whether the Northeast passage might be used to reach Russia, bypassing the jealous states of the Hanseatic League along the Baltic shore. The gamble paid off, and before long the English were rewarded by the chance to visit Great Novgorod, the founding city of Russia and the country’s commercial capital.
The interminable squabbling among the Slavic peoples around the southeast Baltic prompted their leaders to drastic action.
In 865, a large and unwelcome army of Vikings swept across the North Sea, but within sixty years Vikings and English had together established a new, united Kingdom of England. Just three years earlier, the squabbling Slavic peoples of the Baltic’s southeastern shores had actually invited the Vikings over, and within a generation the foundations of Russia had also been laid.
The politicians of Novgorod, angry at Moscow’s interference, thought they would teach her a lesson by selling out to Poland.
In 1471, even as England was being torn apart by the Wars of the Roses, the little republic of Novgorod was rent by its own bitter divisions. The meddling of upstart Moscow in their historic city had become insupportable, and many in the Veche, Novgorod’s civic Council, cried that independence could be achieved only by submission to the King of Poland.
Luka had netted a nice little haul of stolen coins and antiques, but he could not resist stripping down the historic Icon of the Sign too.
The ‘Virgin of the Sign’ is a twelfth-century icon of the Virgin Mary kept to this day in Great Novgorod, Russia — the ‘sign’ refers to the promise made by the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz, that one day a virgin would conceive and bear a son. In 1170 the icon saved the city from a siege, and a special church was built for it, but it would seem that by the seventeenth century the mystique was beginning to wear off.
The city of Great Novgorod in Russia was a mediaeval pioneer of a decidedly rumbustious kind of parliamentary democracy.
In the thirteenth century, England was the westernmost partner of the Hanseatic League, a German-dominated European trade bloc. At the eastern end, in Kievan Rus’, was Novgorod, which shared with London a Viking past and a rebellious public. But even the barons who made John sign Magna Carta (1215) and Henry III the Provisions of Oxford (1258) dreamt of nothing like democracy in Novgorod.
Lucy Cazalet gives an overview of the remarkable Russian ruler, who showed the courage of a prince and the humility of a saint.
Alexander Nevsky (1221-1263), Prince of Novgorod, is a saint of the Russian Church, and one of the country’s greatest heroes. As Lucy Cazalet explains here, Alexander showed humility to keep peace with the Tartars, who were content with Russia’s money, but grew tigerish when more actively threatened by the West, who wanted Russia’s soul.