Lord Great Novgorod
The city of Great Novgorod in Russia was a mediaeval pioneer of a decidedly rumbustious kind of parliamentary democracy.
1100s
King John 1199-1216 to King Henry III 1216-1272
The city of Great Novgorod in Russia was a mediaeval pioneer of a decidedly rumbustious kind of parliamentary democracy.
1100s
King John 1199-1216 to King Henry III 1216-1272
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.
abridged
AT the beginning of the thirteenth century Russia was composed of seven independent princedoms, viz. Kiev, Suzdal, Smolensk, Chernigov, Volynia, Galich, and Novgorod.* Of these, Novgorod, extending from the Gulf of Finland, the Upper Volga, and Lake Peipus, to the White Sea, and almost to the Ural Mountains, was the largest. The country was covered with dense forests, and had a barren, sandy soil, so the people naturally turned more to trade than to agriculture.
Novgorod, the chief town, was a flourishing trading centre, and was in every way the most remarkable of Russian towns.* It was in constant communication with the free towns of the Hanseatic League,* and carried on a brisk trade in fur, tallow, hides, and hemp, and imported arms, cloth, wines, and other foreign products.
* There is a map on Wikimedia Commons of Kievan Rus in 1237.
* There is an impressive panorama at the city’s official portal, Novgorod.ru. Novgorod was chosen as his capital by Viking warlord Rurik, whom the Slavs invited over in 862, at just about the time that his fellow Vikings Ingwaer and Halfdan were readying the Great Heathen Army for an invasion of England. “Our Land is great,” the Slavs told Rurik “but there is no Order or Justice in it; come and rule over us!” He came, and founded Novgorod and Kiev. The city lies today in northwest Russia, about 300 miles northwest of Moscow and 100 miles south of St Petersburg.
* ‘Free cities’ was what the the leading Hanse centres such as Lübeck and Hamburg called themselves, but as the citizens of London could have told the citizens of Novgorod, no city that did business with the Hanse could call herself ‘free’ ever again. See An Odious Monopoly. Like London, Novgorod was not a League member but a ‘Kontor’, a city whose trade and to some degree civic policy was controlled by the League.