Novgorod Republic

At a glance

Where was the Novgorod Republic and what was it called?

Novgorod lay on the Volkhov River, a few kilometres north of where it flows out of Lake Il'men'. The river divided the city into the Sophia Side, with the citadel (Detinets) and the cathedral of St Sophia, and the Trade Side, with the market and Iaroslav's Court. The chronicle's English translators of 1914 listed its northern possessions: Zavoloch'e, the land "beyond the portage" in the basin of the Northern Dvina, Pomor'e, Perm' on the upper Kama, the Pechora and Iugra.

The name of the state is often given as "Lord Novgorod the Great". That title is late. The philologist B. A. Uspenskii showed in 2021 that calling the city gospodin ("lord") is first attested in the treaty with the Hanseatic towns of 1392, the so-called Peace of Niebur, which speaks of "the posadnik and the tysiatskii and all Lord Novgorod the Great". The stronger form gospodar' ("sovereign") appears only between 1468 and 1477. For earlier centuries the correct name is simply Great Novgorod, the form the Novgorod chronicle itself uses.

When was Novgorod founded?

The Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kiev in the early twelfth century, tells a famous story under the year AD 862. The Chuds, Slavs, Krivichians and Ves' had driven out the Varangians who taxed them and fallen into feuds. They then went overseas to the "Varangian Russes" and said: "Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us." Three brothers came, and "the oldest, Rurik, located himself in Novgorod". Another version of the chronicle has Rurik settle first at Ladoga. Its translator Samuel Cross noted that the historicity of Rurik and his brothers "remains until today a subject of learned controversy". It is a dynastic legend, not a record of a founding.

Archaeology gives a more complex picture. Two kilometres south of the citadel, at the outflow of the Volkhov, lies the hillfort now called Riurikovo Gorodishche. That name was coined by local historians only in the early nineteenth century, and the chronicles first mention the Gorodishche in 1103. Its excavator, E. N. Nosov, dated the earliest log used by its builders to AD 889 and found two small hoards of Islamic silver coins of the mid-ninth century and copper coins of the Byzantine emperor Theophilos. Nosov described its finds as "a clear assemblage of objects of Scandinavian origin, alongside artefacts attributable to the Slavs".

Novgorod proper is younger. Its earliest street, the lowest pavement of Velikaia Street in the Nerev excavation, was laid in AD 953 according to dendrochronology. The earliest occupation layers are known at only four points of the city. A GIS model by M. I. Petrov and O. A. Tarabardina estimates the settled area at about 62 hectares in the tenth century and about 294 hectares in the first half of the fourteenth.

When did the Novgorod Republic begin?

There is no single founding date. The usual date of 1136 marks one episode in a long process in which Novgorodians claimed a growing say over their princes.

In 1016, when Iaroslav (later called the Wise) went to fight for Kiev, his Novgorodian troops were mocked by the enemy as men of a "builder of wooden houses": "You are carpenters, and we shall make you build houses for us." Two years later, after a defeat, Iaroslav fled back to Novgorod and planned to escape overseas, but Constantine, son of Dobrynia, "together with the men of Novgorod, destroyed his boat" and raised money for a new army. In 1102 Novgorod envoys told the Kievan grand prince that they did not want his son: "If your son has two heads, you might send him." Of their own prince, Mstislav, they said: "We brought him up as one of us."

The events of 1136 repeated an earlier crisis. In 1132 Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich left for Pereiaslavl' although he had sworn to the Novgorodians "I wish to die in your midst". When he returned, the men of Novgorod, Pskov and Ladoga drove him out and then, "having taken counsel", brought him back. In 1136 they acted again. They confined Vsevolod with his wife, children and mother-in-law in the bishop's court on 28 May, guarded by thirty armed men a day, and let him out of the town on 15 July. On 19 July Sviatoslav Ol'govich arrived from Chernigov as the new prince.

Historians disagree on how far 1136 changed things. The Soviet historian V. L. Ianin's study of the posadniks treats "the rising of 1136" as a turning point in the history of the office. Michael C. Paul questioned this in an article titled "Was the Prince of Novgorod a 'Third-Rate Bureaucrat' after 1136?". By 1228 the Novgorodians could tell a prince: "On condition of our whole liberty and of all the charters of Yaroslav be thou our Knyaz. Or be thou to thyself, and we to ourselves." No charter of Iaroslav survives, and what the phrase referred to is unknown.

How was Novgorod governed?

On paper the structure is clear. The posadnik was the city's chief official, the tysiatskii ("commander of a thousand") led the town militia, the archbishop headed the church, and the prince commanded the army and held court from the Gorodishche. Novgorod could remove posadniks: in 1156 "the men of Novgorod drove out Sudila from the Posadnik-ship" and gave the office to Iakun Miroslavich. In 1348 the reply to the king of Sweden came from "Vladyka Vasili and Posadnik Fedor Danilovich and the Tysyatski Avraam and all the men of Novgorod".

How decisions were actually made is much less clear, and the veche is at the centre of the debate.

• A sovereign people's assembly. This was the view of many nineteenth-century historians and, in a different form, of I. Ia. Froianov, who saw the veche as a vehicle of "people's power".
• A boyar assembly. N. A. Rozhkov argued, by 1924, that Novgorod had become an oligarchy. Ianin proposed that the veche consisted of three to four hundred representatives of leading boyar families, according to the summary in A. Gardner-Thorpe's Cambridge thesis of 2026.
• Not an institution at all. The Swedish historian Jonas Granberg studied every use of the word veche in the chronicles. According to a Russian review of his book, he found that it meant a gathering of townspeople, sometimes a mob of rebels, that its usage hardly changed between 1193 and 1446, and that such assemblies were normal in medieval European towns. His conclusion: "The veche was a political force but not a political institution."

In 1255 a veche at St Nicholas heard "the lesser men" swear to stand together, while "among the greater men there was an evil counsel". A Council of Lords (sovet gospod), which older historians saw as the boyars' real government, is just as hard to pin down in the sources. P. V. Lukin and S. V. Polekhov, writing in 2022, trace a "tendency of the Novgorodian elite towards oligarchy" in the fifteenth century. In practice a small number of boyar families held the elected offices, while the wider townspeople could still make their weight felt in the streets.

What power did the archbishop of Novgorod have?

More than any other bishop in Rus', but less than is often claimed. The key steps are recorded in the Novgorod chronicle:

• 1156: After Bishop Nifont died, "the whole town of people gathered together, and decided to appoint as Bishop for themselves, Arkadi, a man chosen of God". He was consecrated by the metropolitan only in 1158.
• 1165: Bishop Il'ia "was ordered by the Metropolitan [to assume] the Archbishopric". The title was honorific. According to Michael C. Paul, whose 2025 book is the first monograph on the office, it did not make Novgorod independent of the metropolitan, who consecrated every archbishop.
• 1229: When the electors could not agree, Prince Mikhail said: "Let us cast three lots, whom God will give us." The names were laid on the altar, a boy prince drew one, and the deacon Spiridon became archbishop.
• 1388: Archbishop Aleksei resigned and told the city: "Select for yourselves three men [one of] whom God will give you." Three lots were placed on the altar of St Sophia, and Ioann, abbot of the Saviour monastery, was chosen.

Paul traces election by lot to Byzantine monastic practice and shows that it became usual only from the mid-fourteenth century. He also argues against the old view, shared by Henrik Birnbaum and Pierre Gonneau, that the archbishop was a kind of head of state, an idea that goes back to the traveller Guillebert de Lannoy in the early fifteenth century. In Paul's account the archbishop acted together with the posadnik and the tysiatskii, sometimes stood in for an absent prince, and drew his real weight from his land, which made him the largest landowner in the city.

The archbishops certainly acted in politics. In 1418, when the two halves of the city fought on the great bridge, Archbishop Simeon walked out in his vestments and "raised the life-giving Cross and began to bless both sides" until the fighting stopped. In 1428 Archbishop Evfimii I paid the Lithuanian grand duke Vytautas, who had come to Porkhov with an army, another 5,000 of silver "and a sixth thousand for captives", on top of the 5,000 paid by the townspeople. In 1433 his successor Evfimii II "built himself a house in his court and it had thirty doors; and Nemetski masters from oversea made it with masters of Novgorod". The building survives. Research and restoration in 2006–2012 confirmed its role as the centre of the archbishop's court and identified 27 original doorways; its researchers study it in the context of brick Gothic architecture.

Who ruled Novgorod?

Power was shared, so no single list of rulers exists. The table gives the princes and archbishops who mark the turning points, with dates from the Novgorod chronicle unless stated.

What really happened at the Neva and on the ice?

The two battles of Prince Aleksandr Iaroslavich, later known as Alexander Nevsky, are the most famous events in Novgorod's history, and also the most overlaid with legend.

The Neva, 15 July 1240. The Novgorod chronicle records that the Swedes came "in very many ships" with Norwegians and Finnish allies and halted at the mouth of the Izhora, "wishing to take possession of Ladoga, or in one word, of Novgorod". Aleksandr attacked with the men of Novgorod and Ladoga and won. The Swedish commander was killed, the survivors left by night, and the Novgorodian dead numbered "twenty men in all with the men of Ladoga, or less, God knows". The more colourful details come from the Life of Alexander, a hagiography usually dated to the 1280s: the vision of the saints Boris and Gleb seen by an Izhorian elder, and the claim that Aleksandr himself left "the seal of his sharp spear" on the face of the Swedish king. The wounding of the Swedish leader is found only in the Life, which does not name him. Its modern editors note that the expedition was led not by the king but by his son-in-law Birger or by Ulf Fasi.

Lake Peipus, 5 April 1242. After Aleksandr had quarrelled with Novgorod and left in the winter of 1240, German and Estonian raids came within thirty versts of the city, and he was recalled. In 1242 he retook Pskov and met the army of the Teutonic Order and the bishop of Dorpat by Lake Peipus. The Novgorod chronicle says the Germans and Estonians charged "driving themselves like a wedge through their army", and that the Novgorodians pursued them "on the ice, seven versts short of the Subol shore". It counts "of the Nemtsy 400, and fifty they took with their hands". The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, a German verse history of the Order whose story ends in 1290, gives the other side. It claims the Russians had "easily sixty men for every one German knight", places the fighting "on the grass", and admits: "Twenty Brothers lay dead and six were captured." The two counts need not contradict each other: the German figure counts only full knight-brothers of the Order.

None of the three thirteenth-century sources says that the ice broke and the knights drowned. The image is best known from Sergei Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky, which, as the English translators of the Rhymed Chronicle remark, "tells us more about 1939 than 1242". The only breaking ice in the early chronicles is in 1016, when Iaroslav's enemies went out on a frozen lake and "it broke under them".

Did the Mongols conquer Novgorod?

Not by storm, but Novgorod did come under Mongol tribute. In 1238 the Mongol army took Torzhok after a two-week siege and pushed north "to within 100 versts of Novgorod" before turning back. The city was spared.

Twenty years later the demand for tribute arrived. In 1257 "evil news came from Russia, that the Tartars desired the tamga and tithe on Novgorod" – a customs tax and a tenth. The Novgorodians gave presents instead. In the winter of 1259 Mongol census officials came, Aleksandr gave them guards, and the city split. The common people said: "Let us die honourably for St. Sophia and for the angelic houses." But "the greater men bade the lesser be counted for tribute", because, the chronicler says, "the Boyars thought it would be easy for themselves, but fall hard on the lesser men". The officials then "began to ride through the streets, writing down the Christian houses", and left. Aleksandr's legend rarely mentions his part in this.

How did Novgorod trade with the Hanseatic League?

Novgorod's wealth came from two directions. From the north came furs and silver, collected as tribute from Finnic and Ugric peoples. In 1187 tax collectors "in the Pechera and Yugra country were done to death", and in 1193 a Novgorod expedition to Iugra was lured into a trap and destroyed after the Iugra people had promised "silver and sables".

From the west came merchants from Gotland and later from German towns. In 1156 "the oversea merchants put up the Church of the Holy Friday on the market place". In 1188, after Novgorodians were robbed on Gotland, the city let no one "go beyond sea" that spring. The western merchants lived in their own court, the court of St Peter or Peterhof, on the Trade Side. The chronicle's translators described it in 1914 as closed and guarded at night, run by aldermen, and probably dependent at first on Visby on Gotland, later on Lübeck. In their words, the agreement of 1269 between Novgorod, Lübeck and Gotland showed that the Germans "had long possessed a regular commercial status on the Volkhov".

Sweden was the main rival in the north-west. In 1323 Novgorod built a fortress on Orekhov island (Nöteborg) on the Neva, and on 12 August 1323 its prince Iurii Danilovich made peace with King Magnus Eriksson. According to the summary of the treaty in the Diplomatarium Fennicum, Novgorod ceded the districts of Savolax, Jääski and Äyräpää. Finland's foreign ministry describes this as the first border between Sweden and Novgorod, running from Pyhäjoki on the Gulf of Bothnia to the Karelian Isthmus. In 1324 the Swedish captain of Vyborg announced free passage to Novgorod for merchants from Lübeck, Visby and other towns. The peace did not hold: in 1348 Magnus demanded a debate on religion ("Send your philosophers to a conference"), and the Novgorodians told him to ask the patriarch in Constantinople, "for we received the Orthodox faith from the Greeks".

What are the Novgorod birchbark letters?

They are letters, notes and accounts scratched into strips of birch bark with a stylus. On 26 July 1951 a worker on the Nerev excavation, Nina Akulova, found the first one on the pavement of Kholop'ia Street, during excavations led by A. V. Artsikhovskii. Letter no. 1, dated to 1380–1400, is a list of dues from several villages, reckoned in squirrels (bel).

As of October 2026 the official online database of the letters (gramoty.ru) listed 1,260 documents. Most come from Novgorod, the rest from other old Russian towns such as Staraia Russa, Torzhok and Smolensk. They survived in waterlogged soil; UNESCO notes that Novgorod's archaeological layers cover about 347 hectares and are 7–8 metres deep. According to the linguist A. A. Zalizniak, only two letters are written in ink. Most are private letters, and most of the complete ones have fewer than twenty words. A few are in other languages: one in a Baltic Finnic language, one in Latin, one in Greek and one in Low German.

The earliest pieces, an alphabet (no. 591) and a small birchbark icon (no. 915-I), date from the 1030s. The linguist Alexei Gippius links them to the school that Iaroslav founded in Novgorod in 1030, when, according to the Novgorod chronicles, he "gathered 300 children of clergy and nobility to teach them books". Gippius stresses that "not a single piece of native East Slav writing can unambiguously be dated to the time before 988", the year of the conversion of Rus'. Among the best-known letters are the exercises of the boy Onfim (no. 199 and others), dated to 1240–1260, which include an alphabet and a drawing of a beast labelled "I am a beast". Claims that Novgorod had "mass literacy" go beyond the evidence. The letters show that many townspeople used writing for everyday purposes; in the historian Simon Franklin's words, "lay Slavonic writing was a practical convenience, not an institutional imperative".

Why did Novgorod fall to Moscow?

From the fourteenth century Moscow was Novgorod's most dangerous neighbour. In 1386 Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi marched on Novgorod because of the raids of the "Volga men" and took 8,000 roubles. The city tried to balance Moscow against Lithuania. In 1444 the Lithuanian ruler Casimir offered protection if Novgorod received his lieutenants on the Gorodishche, and Novgorod refused. Ten years earlier its archbishop-elect had gone to Smolensk, then under Lithuania, to be consecrated by a metropolitan whom Moscow did not recognise.

The first open break came in 1456. After a Muscovite campaign, Novgorod's envoys made peace with Vasilii II at Iazhelbitsy at the end of February. The treaty reserved the use of seals to the grand princes ("and the seal shall be the grand princes'") and made Novgorod give up lands it had bought in the Rostov and Beloozero regions.

The final crisis began with a death. Archbishop Iona died on 8 November 1470. Prince Mikhail Olel'kovich of Kiev arrived from King Casimir of Poland and Lithuania, and a new archbishop, Feofil, was elected. A draft treaty with Casimir survives. It allowed the king to keep a governor on the Gorodishche "of our faith, the Greek", forbade him to build Roman churches anywhere in Novgorod land, and obliged him to ride out in defence of Novgorod if Moscow attacked. It was to keep Novgorod "in the will of free men". The surviving copy calls it the treaty the Novgorodians "had written" with the king; whether it ever took effect is unclear.

Ivan III treated the approach to Casimir as apostasy. His advance army of 10,000 men under Prince Danilo Kholmskii and Fedor the Motley left Moscow in early June 1471. On the morning of 14 July they met the Novgorodian army on the Shelon River. The Moscow account claims the Novgorodians had "fully 30,000 men", that they broke within an hour, and that 1,700 were captured. It later adds that 7,000 Novgorodians drowned in a storm on Lake Il'men' on their way home, and the Moscow chronicle of 1479 reports 12,000 dead in the fighting among Novgorodians after the defeat. All these figures come from Moscow's side.

Novgorod gave in. A charter of 9 August 1471 records the payment of 15,500 roubles "for the Novgorod transgression" in four instalments; a later chronicle rounds the sum to 16,000. The peace of Korostyn', signed on 11 August, forbade Novgorod to give itself to the king of Poland or to accept Lithuanian princes, required its archbishops to be consecrated in Moscow "at the tomb of St Petr", and stated: "and there shall be no veche charters." The clause about veche charters is often attributed to Iazhelbitsy, but it is in the text of 1471.

Who was Marfa Boretskaia?

Marfa Boretskaia, often called Marfa Posadnitsa ("the posadnik's wife"), was the widow of the posadnik Isaak Boretskii and owned exceptionally large estates. She held no office herself. The 1914 English translation of the Novgorod chronicle gives her husband's name in its introduction as "Simon Boretsky", but the chronicle text it translates calls her "widow of Isaak Boretski", and the treaty documents name her son as Dmitrii Isakovich.

Almost everything said about her politics comes from Muscovite chronicles written to justify Ivan III's war. In their account the devil entered "the wily Marfa", who planned to marry a Lithuanian lord, "to become Queen", and rule Novgorod under the king. The historians Gail Lenhoff and Janet Martin, who re-examined her legend and her land records in 2000, point out how few sources show her taking any part in politics; the main ones are these chronicles compiled at the grand prince's court in the 1470s.

After the Shelon her eldest son Dmitrii, a posadnik, was beheaded at Rusa together with Vasilii Seleznev-Guba and others. One sentence in the 1914 translation seems to say that Marfa too was to be beheaded. That is a misreading. She was not executed in 1471. Her lands were confiscated after the annexation; no reliable record of her later fate was found for this entry.

The legend grew later. Nikolai Karamzin's tale Marfa-posadnitsa, or the Subjugation of Novgorod (written in 1802 and published in 1803) made her a tragic heroine of liberty. The poet Kondratii Ryleev sketched a poem about her in 1822 or 1823, and painters returned to her again and again.

How did the Novgorod Republic end?

In 1477 Ivan III marched on Novgorod again and camped at Paozer'e, outside the city. His demands, delivered through his boyars, were blunt: "there shall be no veche bell in our patrimony Novgorod, no posadnik; we shall hold our sovereignty … as in our Lower land." The negotiations in January 1478 are recorded in detail by the Moscow chronicles that Ianin quotes. On 8 January the grand prince granted a yearly tribute of half a grivna per plough; on 13 January the subject towns and the northern lands were told to renounce their oath to Novgorod and swear to the grand princes. Many modern accounts give 15 January 1478 as the day of Novgorod's formal submission. That date could not be checked against the chronicle text for this entry. A Novgorod chronicle quoted by Uspenskii says simply that "Archbishop Feofil and the Novgorodians" petitioned Ivan, called him sovereign, and opened the city to him.

The symbol of the city went to Moscow. According to the Moscow chronicle, when Ivan returned to Moscow on 5 March 1478 he had "their veche bell" brought after him and hung in the bell-frame on the square "to ring with the other bells". The Pskov chronicle summarised the terms: there should be no posadnik, no tysiatskii and no veche in Great Novgorod. Granberg doubted that a special veche bell ever existed; Lukin argues that it did, and compares its removal to Edward I's removal of the Stone of Scone from Scotland in 1296. The Tver' chronicle adds that Ivan took the archbishop and many boyars to Moscow and left Prince Vasilii Obolenskii as governor; in fact Feofil was arrested only in 1480, according to the chronicles cited by Lenhoff and Martin.

The deportations followed. Ivan's charter of 1478, as M. N. Tikhomirov reconstructed it, promised not to remove Novgorod boyars and not to take their estates; according to the historian M. M. Bentsianov, Ivan broke both promises "almost at once". In 1488 alone, a chronicle from Ustiug records, he moved "many boyars and zhit'i people and merchants, more than a thousand heads in all" out of Novgorod, and Muscovite servitors received their lands. In the autumn of 1494 the Hanseatic court was closed and its merchants arrested. The governors blamed the treatment of Russians in Livonia and the burning of a Russian in Reval. It reopened after a Russian–Hanseatic treaty in 1514.

What happened to Novgorod after 1478?

Novgorod's worst catastrophe came under Moscow's rule. In 1570 Ivan IV, the Terrible, came with a large army after rumours that Archbishop Pimen and the city's leaders planned to surrender Novgorod to foreigners. A later Novgorod chronicle says that "for five weeks or more, day after day, up to 1,000 people of all ages were thrown into the water daily, and on some days up to 1,500". Contemporaries spoke of 20,000 or 60,000 dead, and later historians reckoned about 40,000. The historian R. G. Skrynnikov rejected these numbers: the city had no more than 25,000–30,000 inhabitants, and the lists of victims in the tsar's own commemoration book (the Sinodik) point to 2,000–3,000 killed. Pimen was paraded on a mare facing backwards and carried off to Moscow.

During the Time of Troubles a Swedish force of about 4,000 under Jacob De la Gardie took the city in July 1611; one of the attackers wrote that "barely 100 or 150" of their own men fell. Novgorod remained under Swedish occupation until 1617. In the Second World War German troops occupied it from 19 August 1941 to 20 January 1944. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, only 40 of 2,346 houses survived.

Novgorod also became a place of national memory. On 8 September 1862 Alexander II unveiled the Millennium of Russia monument in the citadel, marking a thousand years since the calling of Rurik. It has 129 figures, 109 of them in the lower frieze. The occupiers dismantled it; it was the first monument restored after liberation and was reopened on 2 November 1944. In 1992 UNESCO inscribed 37 monuments of Novgorod and its surroundings on the World Heritage List, and in 1999 the city officially took back the name Velikii Novgorod.

Common myths about the Novgorod Republic

Timeline of the Novgorod Republic

What the map shows next

The border data draws Novgorod from 1056 to 1240 and again from 1285 to 1481; the gap and the early start are artefacts of the map data, not historical breaks. At 1383 on the map it covers the north-west of today's Russia, with the Pskov Republic to its south-west; from 1259 it paid tribute to the Mongols of the Golden Horde. Its western rival in the thirteenth century was the Teutonic Order. After the annexation its lands belong to the Grand Principality of Moscow and, from 1547, to the Tsardom of Russia. For the earlier Rus' state from which Novgorod emerged, see Kievan Rus'; for its neighbours, see Vladimir-Suzdal, Tver, the Teutonic Order and the Kingdom of Sweden.