Rostov-Suzdal

At a glance

Where was Rostov-Suzdal and who lived there first?

Rostov-Suzdal lay in the forest and lake country of the upper Volga basin, north-east of today's Moscow. Its two old centres were Rostov, on the shore of Lake Nero, and Suzdal, in the open, fertile country called the Opol'e between the rivers Nerl' and Koloksha.

Before Slav settlers arrived, this was the land of the Merya, a Finnic people. The Russian Primary Chronicle places them precisely: "At Beloozero are situated the Ves', and on the lake of Rostov, the Merya, and on Lake Kleshchino the Merya also." The lake of Rostov is Lake Nero, and Lake Kleshchino is today's Lake Pleshcheevo at Pereslavl-Zalessky. The chronicle also says that in Rostov "the first settlers were … Merians". It mentions the Merya for the last time under the year AD 907.

Archaeology fills in the picture. A. E. Leont'ev's study of Merian sites, published by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1996, finds that "Merian settlements appear on the shores of Lake Nero in the 7th century. In all there are nineteen known open settlements and one defended site." The defended site was Sarskoe gorodishche, the hill-fort on the river Sara, 15 km south of Rostov. In the early ninth century, Leont'ev writes, "European products and Arab silver coins appeared amongst the Merya", and all these imports were concentrated at Sara. Among the finds is a firesteel decorated in the Scandinavian "gripping beast" style, which he calls "the work of a Scandinavian master-craftsman". He suggests that Sara "served as a general tribal centre" for the Merian communities around the lake.

Slavs came later. "Widespread colonisation by the Slavs began later in the 10th century, according to the archaeological data," Leont'ev writes. Suzdal grew up "in the most completely occupied parts of former Finnish territory", and even Vladimir, which "arose later at the beginning of the 12th century", stood where Merian settlements had been. The English editors of the Primary Chronicle add that the Vyatichians of the upper Oka "were accordingly among the first Slavic colonists in the districts of Rostov and Suzdal'". For Leont'ev, the Merian pattern of settlement "determined the original boundaries of the Rostov princedom".

Was Sarskoe gorodishche the first Rostov?

Probably not, although that was the standard view for half a century. In 1905 the archaeologist A. A. Spitsyn dated the hill-fort to the tenth century and suggested that it was "the original site of Rostov or a separate Russian fortification of that time". The view became widely accepted. Only after Voronin's own excavations in Rostov in 1955–1956, which reached town layers of at least the tenth century, did scholars begin to argue that Rostov was no younger than Sara.

Leont'ev's conclusion is that the two places existed side by side. "The complexity of the ethno-social situation in the 10th-beginning of the 11th century is revealed by the co-existence of two centres: the defended site of the Merya at Sara and the Ancient Rus' town at Rostov." Rostov "began not later than the middle of the 10th century", covered at least 15 hectares by the early eleventh century, and grew to more than ten times that size over the next 150 years. Sara was abandoned in the first half of the eleventh century. In his words, "The final destruction of Merian tribal organization took place during the reign of Prince Yaroslav 'the Wise'." Asking whether Sara was the chronicle's original Rostov is therefore, he argues, the wrong question: what happened was a shift of the political centre.

How did Rostov come under the princes of Kiev?

The Primary Chronicle's story begins with legend. Under the year AD 862 it tells how Rurik, after his brothers died, "assigned cities to his followers, Polotsk to one, Rostov to another, and to another Beloozero". That account was written down in Kiev long after the events it describes. Leont'ev, writing as an archaeologist, accepts only that there is "no reason to doubt the subjection of the north-eastern territories to the Ancient Rus' state in the second half of the 9th century".

The first named princes of Rostov were sons of Vladimir I of Kievan Rus'. The chronicle lists "Yaroslav in Rostov" among his sons' seats; when the eldest son died in Novgorod, Vladimir "set Yaroslav over Novgorod, Boris over Rostov". Boris was murdered in 1015 and later venerated with his brother Gleb as a saint.

The land was not quiet. In 1024 "magicians appeared in Suzdal'", the first time the chronicle names the town, "and killed old people by satanic inspiration and devil worship, saying that they would spoil the harvest". There was famine, and people went down the Volga to the Bulgars of Volga Bulgaria to buy grain. Yaroslav came to Suzdal', seized the magicians, and punished some. A second episode, told in the chronicle's block of entries for 1069–1071, is set in a famine "in the district of Rostov". Two magicians from Yaroslavl went along the Volga and the Sheksna killing women whom they blamed for the famine. At Beloozero they met Yan Vyshatich, who was collecting tribute for Prince Svyatoslav. Yan had them seized, and the relatives of their victims "seized and killed the magicians, whom they hanged upon an oak tree". In 1091, the chronicle adds, "a magician appeared at Rostov, but perished shortly afterward."

Who these magicians were is an open question. The editors of the English translation, S. H. Cross and O. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, note that some scholars regard them as Finnish shamans, while "they may equally well be debased survivors of the Slavic pagan cult in a remote border district".

How did Christianity reach Rostov?

Slowly, and the early bishops are hard to pin down. The first securely dated bishop of Rostov appears in 1089, when "Isaiah, Bishop of Rostov" was among the prelates who consecrated the new church of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Bishop Ephraim of Rostov gave villages to the church of St Demetrius in Suzdal; the English editors, following the church historian E. E. Golubinsky, give him the see from 1090 to 1119.

The most famous bishop, St Leontius (Leontii) of Rostov, comes from two sources that contradict each other. The Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia (Orthodox Encyclopaedia), the reference work of the Russian Orthodox Church, sets out both versions and dates him "from 1073/75 to 1076/77?".

• The Life of Leontius, in its oldest form, makes him the third bishop. His two predecessors, Feodor and Ilarion, "fled, not bearing the insults of the people". It calls Leontius a Greek raised in Constantinople who knew "the Rus' and the Merian language" well. He preached to the children and "died in peace".
• Bishop Simon of Vladimir, in a letter included in the Kievan Caves Patericon in the early thirteenth century, calls Leontius a monk of the Caves Monastery and a martyr, "whom the unbelievers, having tortured him much, killed".

The historians M. D. Priselkov and N. N. Voronin treated the Life as a "tendentious fiction" of the later twelfth century, written to give the see of Rostov older ties with Constantinople at the time when Andrei Bogolyubsky wanted a metropolitan of his own. The encyclopaedia's author disagrees in part. Leontius was in fact canonised on the order of Bishop Ioann of Rostov in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.

When did Rostov-Suzdal become Vladimir Monomakh's land?

The date 1093, used on this site and in many reference works, is an interpretation rather than a chronicle event. In April 1093 Grand Prince Vsevolod Yaroslavich of Kiev died. His son Vladimir Monomakh, fearing war with his cousin Svyatopolk, left Kiev to him and went to Chernigov. Modern accounts take this as the moment when Rostov became Monomakh's own patrimony rather than his father's.

But Monomakh had known Rostov for twenty years by then. In the Instruction he wrote for his sons, he lists his journeys in order: "First I rode to Rostov through the Vyatichians, whither my father had sent me while he himself went to Kursk." Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor connect this first journey with the time "when Izyaslav fled to Poland in 1073". The Instruction goes on to mention later stays: "We then returned again to Rostov for the winter, and three winters later I returned to Smolensk. Thence I went to Rostov." After making peace with the Polovtsian khan Aepa and receiving his daughter as a bride for his son, he writes, "we proceeded to Smolensk. Thence we journeyed to Rostov." The north-east was thus already part of the patrimony of Vsevolod's line in the 1070s.

The land had to be defended in 1096. Monomakh's cousin Oleg Svyatoslavich of the Chernigov line attacked Monomakh's son Izyaslav at Murom and told him: "Return to your own father's district in Rostov, for this is my father's territory here." Izyaslav was killed on 6 September. Oleg took Suzdal' and Rostov, "appointed regents in each city, and began to exact tribute". Monomakh's son Mstislav came from Novgorod with men from Novgorod, Rostov and Beloozero. Oleg retreated, and at Suzdal' "he directed that the city should be burned"; only the Caves Monastery's house and the church of St Demetrius survived. At the battle on the Kulachek, near the river Koloksha, Mstislav's men carried his father's banner, and "when Oleg beheld the standard, he was terrified". Mstislav won. The English editors read the episode as showing that "Rostov-Suzdal' were momentarily attached to Pereyaslavl'", Monomakh's southern seat.

Who was Yuri Dolgoruky?

Yuri, also called George (Georgii, in the chronicles often "Giurgi"), was a son of Vladimir Monomakh, and the founder of the line from which the princes of Vladimir and Moscow descended.

• Birth. The pre-revolutionary Russkii biograficheskii slovar' (Russian Biographical Dictionary) gives "about 1090", noting that by the eighteenth-century historian V. N. Tatishchev he died aged 66 and so was born in 1091. The Moscow city portal Uznai Moskvu says the date is unknown: he was long thought to have been born around 1100, but a new analysis points to the mid-1090s "or even slightly earlier".
• Birth order. The dictionary calls him Monomakh's fourth son. The Moscow portal and the Russian Museum call him the sixth.
• Marriage. On 12 January, in the chronicle year 6615 (1107, perhaps January 1108 by modern reckoning), "Vladimir took the daughter of Aepa son of Osen', to be the wife of Prince George". The marriage sealed Monomakh's peace with the Polovtsians of the Cuman-Kipchak steppe.
• Start of his rule. No chronicle records when Yuri was installed in Rostov-Suzdal. The biographical dictionary says only that the land fell to him "still in his father's lifetime", and the Russian Museum gives "from 1113". The first dated record of him in the north is a campaign of 1120: "Georgii his brother went against the Bulgars, took many captives and defeated their army." By 1135 the land was clearly his, for in that year he gave his brother Yaropolk "Suzdal' and Rostov and the rest of his volost', but not all" in exchange for Pereyaslavl in the south.

The epithet Dolgoruky, "Long-Arm", was not used in his lifetime. The Moscow portal states that it first appears in the first half of the fifteenth century, in the younger recension of the Novgorod First Chronicle, and that it refers to his far-reaching politics, not to his body. The Russian Museum says he was "probably" so called because he spent his life trying to win Kiev.

Why did Suzdal overtake Rostov?

Rostov was the older town and the bishop's seat. Under Yuri, however, Suzdal became the prince's town. The Moscow portal says that he "moved the capital of the principality from old Rostov to Suzdal" and set up his residence at Kideksha nearby. No chronicle gives a date for such a move. What the chronicles do show is that in the 1140s Suzdal' was where Yuri lived. In 1146 the body of his son Ivan was taken "to Suzdal', to his father". In 1148 his sons Gleb and Rostislav set out "from Suzdal'" to fight in the south.

Kideksha lies on the Nerl', about 4 km east of Suzdal. The Kiev Chronicle in the Hypatian Codex, recording the death of Yuri's son Boris, says that his brothers buried him "in the church of the holy martyrs which his father Giurgi had built on the Nerl', at Kideksha, where the camp of the holy martyrs Boris and Gleb had been". The two chronicles date Boris's death differently, but agree that Yuri had built the church.

The chronicle gives no year for its construction. The Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve, which looks after the building, states that it "was built in 1152" and calls it "the oldest stone building on the territory of the vast Russian North-East". UNESCO, which inscribed it in 1992 as part of the White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal, describes it as "the first church in Russia to be built in white limestone, the style that came to characterize above all else the 12th-century architecture of Vladimir". It is a small square church, 15.5 by 15.5 metres, with three apses.

Which towns did Yuri Dolgoruky found?

The Russian Biographical Dictionary says that in the north Yuri was busy above all building towns and churches. It names Yuriev-Polsky, Pereslavl-Zalessky "(1152)" and Dmitrov, and adds that "the founding of Moscow is also attributed to him". The Moscow city portal gives a longer list and notes that it "is regularly refined by researchers".

The dates need care:

• Pereslavl-Zalessky. The Pereslavl Museum-Reserve states plainly that the town was "founded by Prince Yuri Dolgoruky in 1152", as a new fortress on Lake Pleshcheevo. Its Transfiguration Cathedral is also dated 1152. The Laurentian Chronicle confirms that Yuri began the cathedral: in 1157 his son Andrei "completed the church which his father had founded earlier, the stone church of the Holy Saviour" at Pereslavl. It was the seat of an appanage principality from 1212 to 1302.
• Yuriev-Polsky and Dmitrov. The foundation years usually given, 1152 and 1154, are traditional. They do not appear in the Laurentian or Hypatian chronicles consulted for this entry. - Moscow. Moscow is first mentioned in 1147 (see below), and its fortification is placed in 1156. The second date comes from the Moscow portal, which writes that in 1156 "new wooden walls were built and a ditch dug". The chronicles consulted for this entry do not record it.

Yuri's churches were built of local white limestone. Kideksha and the Pereslavl cathedral, both traditionally dated 1152, compete for the title of the earliest. The Moscow portal calls Kideksha "one of the oldest white-stone buildings of North-Eastern Rus'", which is the safest formula.

What really happened at Moscow in 1147?

The chronicle entry that gave Moscow its founding date describes a meeting and a feast, not a foundation. It is in the Kiev Chronicle of the Hypatian Codex, under the year 6655 (1147), in the middle of a war. Yuri was raiding the lands of Novgorod and had taken Novyi Torg. He asked his ally Svyatoslav Olgovich to raid the Smolensk land, and Svyatoslav took captives among the Goliad' on the upper Protva. Then, in the chronicle's words: "And Giurgi sent and said: 'Come to me, brother, to Moscow.'"

Svyatoslav came with his son Oleg. Oleg rode ahead and gave Yuri a pardus, a hunting leopard or cheetah. The princes met with affection "on Friday, on the feast of the Laudation of the Holy Mother of God, and so they made merry". "Next day Giurgi ordered a mighty dinner to be prepared", honoured his guests, and gave them many gifts.

The passage shows that Moscow already existed. It was a place where a prince could invite an ally and lay on a great feast. Nothing in the text says that Yuri founded it. The pre-revolutionary biographical dictionary is careful: the founding of Moscow "is attributed to him". The Russian Museum calls him the "legendary founder" of the city. The year 1147 became Moscow's official birthday, and the 800th anniversary in 1947 fixed Yuri's image as its founder.

How did Yuri Dolgoruky win Kiev, and how did he die?

From the 1130s Yuri was drawn into the struggle for Kiev, and from the late 1140s it took over his life. His rival was his nephew Izyaslav Mstislavich of Volhynia, who held Kiev when the fighting began.

• 1149. According to the Moscow portal, Yuri defeated Izyaslav near Pereyaslavl in late summer and entered the city. The Laurentian Chronicle says simply: "Giurgi sat in Kiev."
• 1150–1151. Izyaslav won Kiev back. According to the Moscow portal, he briefly retook the city in the summer of 1150 and drove Yuri out for good in March 1151.
• 1154. Yuri set out again "with the Rostovians and the Suzdalians and all his children", but a plague among the horses, "such as had never been", stopped him short of Kozelsk, and he went back to Suzdal.
• 1155. After Izyaslav's death in November 1154, Yuri marched again. He sent word to the new holder, Izyaslav Davydovich of Chernigov: "Kiev is my patrimony, not yours." Izyaslav gave way, and Yuri, "thanking God, entered Kiev". The Laurentian Chronicle places this at the end of its year 6662, before the heading for 6663 (1155); modern works date it to spring 1155.

That same year Andrei, whom Yuri had set in Vyshgorod near Kiev, left for the north "without his father's will". He took with him an icon of the Mother of God, "which had been brought from Tsar'grad", and adorned it with more than 50 grivnas of gold. He placed it in his church at Vladimir. As the Vladimir icon, it became one of the most venerated images in Russia. The Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia suggests that this won him the support of the Rostov-Suzdal boyars.

Yuri did not hold Kiev for long. The Hypatian Codex tells the end plainly. In May 1157 Izyaslav Davydovich was preparing to march on Kiev when men from the city came to him and said: "Go, prince, to Kiev, Giurgi is dead." Izyaslav wept and said: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, that Thou hast judged between me and him by death, and not by bloodshed."

The chronicle then explains: "Giurgi had drunk at the os'menik Petrila's; that night he fell ill, and his illness lasted five days." Yuri died in Kiev "on 15 May, on Wednesday night", and was buried next morning in the monastery of the Holy Saviour at Berestovo. The Laurentian Chronicle gives the same date.

What followed shows how the Kievans felt about him. They plundered his "Red Court" and his court across the Dnieper, "which he himself called Paradise", and his son Vasilko's court in the city. "They killed Suzdalians in the towns and villages and seized their goods."

The idea that Yuri was poisoned is an inference from this sequence of feast, illness and riot. The chronicle does not say it. The Russian Museum writes that his death was "by some suppositions" caused by poisoning, and the Moscow portal that it "gave rise to rumours of poisoning".

Who ruled Rostov-Suzdal?

The table lists the princes and holders of the Rostov land to the end of the succession war of 1174–1177. Dates before 1120 rest on stray chronicle notices, and several are disputed.

What happened after Yuri's death in 1157?

The land chose its own prince. The Laurentian Chronicle reports: "The Rostovians and Suzdalians, having all taken counsel, took Andrei, his eldest son, and set him in Rostov on his father's throne, and in Suzdal', for he was loved by all." The Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia adds that this was against Yuri's testament, which favoured Mikhalko and Vsevolod, his younger sons by his second marriage. When the chronicler describes the assembly of 1174, he reminds his readers that the men of the land had sworn to Yuri to accept his younger sons, and had broken that oath to set up Andrei.

Andrei did not rule from either old town. In 1158 he began the stone Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Vladimir, endowed it with villages, a tithe of his herds and of the market, "and founded a greater town". UNESCO dates the cathedral to 1158 and calls it the intended "religious centre of all Russia". In the words of the Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia, "the centre of the principality moved from the old capital Rostov and Yuri Dolgoruky's residence Suzdal to Vladimir". From this point the story belongs to Vladimir-Suzdal.

Rostov also lost ground in the Church. The Rostovians and Suzdalians drove out Bishop Leon "because he had multiplied churches, robbing priests". Andrei wanted a separate metropolitan for Vladimir under his favourite Feodorets. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Luke Chrysoberges, refused, allowing only that the bishop's residence be moved from Rostov to Vladimir. In 1160, the Laurentian Chronicle records, "Rostov burned, and all the churches, and the cathedral, the wondrous and great church of the Holy Mother of God".

Why did Rostov fight Vladimir in 1174–1177?

Andrei was murdered at Bogolyubovo on 29 June 1174 by men of his own court. The Laurentian Chronicle's account of the war that followed is our best evidence for the rivalry between the "old towns" and the new.

The Rostovians, Suzdalians, men of Pereslavl and "all the druzhina" met at Vladimir. They decided to call in Andrei's nephews, the Rostislavichi Mstislav and Yaropolk, rather than his brothers Mikhalko and Vsevolod. Mikhalko held Vladimir against them for a time, until hunger forced the townspeople to ask him to leave. The chronicler says the Rostovians wanted to punish the town: "We will burn it, or else put a posadnik in it: they are our slaves, the stonemasons." The Rostovians then set Mstislav on the throne of Rostov.

The Rostislavichi did not rule well, in the chronicler's view. They handed out the posts of posadnik in the towns to their followers from the south, who "caused great hardship to the people with fines and penalties". The chronicler gives his own view of the quarrel: "the old towns Rostov and Suzdal' and all the boyars", wishing to impose their own will, said, "Vladimir is our dependent town (prigorod)." God and the Mother of God, he concludes, sided with Vladimir.

In June 1176 Mikhalko, with his brother Vsevolod, defeated the Rostislavichi. Mstislav fled to Novgorod and Yaropolk to Ryazan. Mikhalko entered Vladimir as "the grand prince of all the Rostov land". Mikhalko died on 20 June 1177. The Vladimirians gathered before the Golden Gate and kissed the cross to Vsevolod, who went on to rule the whole land from Vladimir.

What became of Rostov and Suzdal later?

Rostov became a principality again in the next generation. In the winter of 1207, the Laurentian Chronicle records, Vsevolod "kept Konstantin with him and gave him Rostov and five other towns to Rostov". The Sovetskaia istoricheskaia entsiklopediia (1969) dates the appanage principality of Rostov from 1207. Besides Rostov it included Yaroslavl, Uglich, Mologa, Beloozero and Ustiug.

The principality then split up. Konstantin became grand prince of Vladimir in 1216 and divided Rostov among his sons. Yaroslavl and Uglich split off, and after 1238 so did Beloozero, which became the Principality of Beloozero. In 1328 the town itself was divided into two halves, the Sretenskaia and the Borisoglebskaia. From the mid-fourteenth century Moscow's grand princes gained influence there. Ivan Kalita bought Uglich, and under Dmitry Donskoy the Rostov princes became in effect "service" princes of Moscow. The Sretenskaia half passed to Moscow in the first half of the fifteenth century.

The end came by sale. In 1474, the chronicle tells, the Rostov princes Vladimir Andreevich and Ivan Ivanovich "sold to the grand prince Ivan Vasilievich their patrimony, the half of Rostov". Ivan III gave it to his mother, Grand Princess Maria.

Rostov kept its spiritual standing. The Laurentian Chronicle records that on 25 February, in the year it dates 1230, the relics of St Leontius were moved into the cathedral of the Holy Mother of God.

Suzdal's later story is less fully covered by the sources used for this entry. According to the English chronicle editors, citing Golubinsky, Monomakh had built the town's first stone church, the Cathedral of Our Lady, which was replaced by a new building in 1222–1225. UNESCO's description of the Suzdal Kremlin gives a Cathedral of the Nativity "built in the 13th century and reconstructed in the 16th", and the Monastery of Our Saviour and St Euthymius, "founded in 1352". In the fourteenth century Suzdal's princes were linked with Nizhny Novgorod, which has its own entry.

What is the legacy of Rostov-Suzdal?

Architecture. The white-stone churches begun under Yuri became the hallmark of the north-east. UNESCO describes the architecture of Vladimir-Suzdal as "characterized by stonework faced in regular blocks of white limestone, refined proportions, fine stone carving". The Moscow portal calls building in local limestone the great innovation under Yuri and his sons. Kideksha, Vladimir and Suzdal are World Heritage sites together, inscribed in 1992.

The Golden Ring. The name is modern. The journalist Yuri Bychkov said in a 2014 interview that the idea came to him in 1965, when he was in Suzdal with a colleague from the newspaper Sovetskaia kul'tura. He drove the thousand-kilometre loop in November 1967, during five days off for the holidays. The official brand site dates the name exactly: on 21 November 1967 Sovetskaia kul'tura published a series of articles under the title "Zolotoe kol'tso", the Golden Ring. Rostov Veliky, Suzdal, Pereslavl-Zalessky and Vladimir were among its first eight towns.

Moscow's founder. Yuri's image as the founder of Moscow is largely a modern creation. The USSR Council of Ministers decided on 13 August 1947, for Moscow's 800th anniversary, to put up a bronze equestrian statue of the prince. According to the Moscow Main Archive, the inscription on the pedestal was to read: "To the founder of Moscow, Yuri Dolgoruky. The monument was erected to mark the 800th anniversary of Moscow. 1147–1947." The sculptor was S. M. Orlov, whose design won the competition of 1946 and earned him a Stalin Prize. The opening was planned for 7 September 1952 but took place on 6 June 1954, on what was then Sovetskaia (now Tverskaia) Square.

Common myths about Rostov-Suzdal

Timeline of Rostov-Suzdal

What the map shows next

The border data draws Rostov-Suzdal from 1056 to 1240, keeping the older name for the whole north-eastern land until the Mongol invasion. At 1148 on the map it fills the upper Volga basin, with the lands of Kiev to the south-west and Novgorod to the north-west. At 1240 on the map it is drawn for the last time. By Vladimir-Suzdal the land appears under its later name, beside Beloozero and under the overlordship of the Golden Horde. In 1474, when the last half of Rostov was sold, the region belongs to the Grand Principality of Moscow.