The Widow Princess of Minsk
Inés Garcia de la Puente
The protagonist of this portrait is a twelfth-century Minsk princess whose name we do not know. Little was recorded in contemporary sources about the life of Rus’ women, even of elite women like her. Compared to others, however, our Minsk princess is exceptional because the Kievan Chronicle (ca. 1200) devoted an encomium to her upon her death. Through it we learn many bits of precious information, like that that she died at age eighty-four in the night of January 3, 1158 and that she had been a widow for forty years; it explains where she was buried and provides details of her donations to the monastery in her life and in her testament. The wording of the Kievan Chronicle allows for the interpretation that she may have actually ruled in Minsk during the decades of her widowhood. Other circumstances make this option a possibility: on the one hand, for most of the years of her widowhood, there seems to be no other prince of Minsk; on the other hand, also at around the same time, other princesses of Polotsk would take over leadership roles while the male members of their families were exiled in Constantinople.
The portrait that follows reconstructs how the Minsk princess could have come to rule; I try to provide a likely description of what the circumstances of her marriage, widowhood, and death were, and what her daily life and duties would have been like. Many details are based on actual information about her, Gleb, and Minsk in contemporary sources, and on archaeological studies; to the bone of historical evidence I add the flesh of some imagination and many an educated guess.
Further Reading
Primary sources
The encomium about Gleb’s widow appears in the Kievan Chronicle under the year 1158:
Shakhmatov, Aleksei A. (ed.) Ipat’evskaia letopis’, Polnoe Sobranie Russkikh Letopisej, vol. 2. Saint Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Arkheograficheskaia Kommissiia tipografiia M. A. Aleksandrova, 1908 [1998].
A translation into English can be found in:
Heinrich, Lisa. The Kievan Chronicle: A Translation and Commentary [PhD Thesis, University of Vanderbilt, 1977, copyright 1978].
Secondary literature
Alekseev, Leonid V. Zapadnye zemli domongolʹskoi Rusi: Ocherki istorii, arkheologii, kulʹtury. 2 vols. Moskva: Nauka, 2006.
Eck, Alexandre. “La situation juridique de la femme russe au Moyen Age.” Recueils de la societe Jean Bodin 12, no. 2 (1962): 405–420.
Garcia de la Puente, Ines. “Gleb of Minsk’s Widow: Neglected Evidence on the Rule of a Woman in Rus’ian History?” Russian History 39 (2012): 347–378.
Goehrke, Carsten. Russischer Alltag. Eine Geschichte in Zeitbildern. Vol. 1: Die Vormoderne. Zurich: Chronos, 2003.
Levin, Eve. “Women and Property in Medieval Novgorod: Dependence and Independence.” Russian History 10, no. 2 (1983): 154–169.
Pushkareva, Natal’ia L. Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Translated and edited by Eve Levin. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
Weickhardt, George G. “Legal Rights of Women in Russia, 1100–1750.” Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 1–23.