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Prince Vladimir of Pskov

Anti Selart

Vladimir of Pskov was a prince in the political arena in northwest Rus’ and the Baltics in the first half of the thirteenth century. He is not among the top stars in the historical writing of the period and the region and is overshadowed in the history books by more influential and powerful contemporaries – or, most often, is not mentioned at all. However, what makes his person striking is the fact that he was able to validate himself as a ruling prince during this very complicated period when significant changes were underway in both Rus’ and the Baltics. And he achieved this in a frontier region, where many different ethnicities, as well as religions and confessions, converged and intermingled – here connected the “East” and the “West” that are often seen as inflexible and intrinsically contentious units. However, the people of the thirteenth century living in this area stood much closer to each other – Christians and heathens, Catholics and Orthodox – then some contemporary polemic texts present it. And, certainly, they stood much closer to each other than several modern narratives about an immemorial “Russian-German” conflict try to convince their readers.

Of course, the fact that Vladimir has been overshadowed is also based on the sources. He appears on the pages of the Novgorod chronicle only when he is acting together with the Novgorod army. Pskov, as most of the smaller centers of Rus’ at that time, lacked local chronicle writing. Therefore, it turns out that the most informative medieval text about Prince Vladimir is from neighboring Livonia, rather than Rus’ itself. This is the Latin Livonian Chronicle, which is thought to have been authored by a priest named Henry (d. c. 1260). In the 1220s, Henry wrote a chronicle of the Riga camp of crusaders, which featured Bishop Albert of Riga (1199–1229) as the main hero and told the story of the conquest of the lands of the Livs and Estonians by the crusaders and the military order of the Brethren of the Sword (Swordbrothers). In this war, the rivals (and sometimes allies) of Riga’s crusaders (most of whom came from Saxony) were the King of Denmark and the Rus’ lands of Polotsk, Pskov, and Novgorod. In summary, there is significantly more that is unknown than known even in the most elementary data of Vladimir’s biography. We even cannot be really sure about his father because his patronymic is not registered in the medieval sources.

As a brief biographical sketch, Vladimir was most likely born in the 1170s, or slightly earlier, as he had a daughter of marriageable age in c. 1210. Vladimir appeared on the political arena in 1208, when he participated in Novgorod’s campaign against raiding Lithuanians. The next year he was already the Prince of Pskov. His career seemingly depended on the political success of prince Mstislav Mstislavich the Bold, who was, probably, the younger brother of Vladimir and who became the prince of Novgorod in this time. Novgorod and Pskov were among the Rus’ lands that lacked a local princely family with hereditary power –power belonged to the local community, which expressed its will at meetings of the veche (assembly) and invited a prince from another Rus’ land to become its judge and military leader. Various branches of the princely dynasty of Rus’ competed for princely power in these towns, but local powers also relied on foreign princely rulers. In 1209 Vladimir received Velikie Luki, on the southern border of the Novgorod lands, to rule, but he also remained the Prince of Pskov until 1212 when according to the Novgorod chronicle “the people of Pskov at that time had driven out Prince Vladimir from amongst them.”

Vladimir then headed for neighboring Livonia where revolutionary events were occurring in the thirteenth century. The east coast of the Baltic Sea, which was increasingly influenced by Christianity, both Western and Eastern Christian, in the twelfth century, still lacked ecclesiastical institutions and an episcopal system. The sporadic plundering raids that had gone on for centuries across the Baltic Sea between Scandinavia and the Baltics started to be reframed as a crusade against Baltic pagans in the second half of the twelfth century. The leading role in this process was played by nobles from Saxony. During the thirteenth century, the Finnic peoples (Livs and Estonians) and Baltic peoples (Letts, Curonians, Semgallians and Selonians) were subjugated and Christianized. This resulted in the creation of medieval Livonia, a conglomerate of the holdings of the clerical states and the King of Denmark, which approximately corresponds to the territories of modern-day Estonia and Latvia. The subjugation methods of the Crusaders were not limited to war and conquest. A patronage relationship was forced on some local leaders, while others collaborated with the crusaders in their own interests. The Livonian relations with the Rus’ centres were also multifaceted. They included both wars and alliances. Around 1210, the Bishop of Riga and Prince of Pskov cooperated in order to conquer southeast Estonia. This cooperation was fixed around 1210 by the marriage between Vladimir’s daughter (we do not know her name) and Bishop Albert’s brother Theoderich. However, this collaboration later turned into a competition where Novgorod and occasionally some princes of northeastern Rus’ interfered as well. Vladimir appears for the last time in the sources in 1225–26, when, together with his son Iaroslav, he was fighting against the Lithuanian invaders on Toropets land, his patrimonial possession. According to a later, perhaps apocryphal tradition, Vladimir’s wife’s name was Agrippina and they were both buried in Rzhev, a castle in the periphery of the Toropets principality. The prince may have died in the early 1230s.

The death of Vladimir did not end his family’s relations with Livonia. Theoderich established the famous Baltic-German noble family of von der Ropp (although, it is true that, since the death date of Vladimir’s daughter is not known, we cannot be totally sure that she was the family’s forebear). In 1230s, it is evident that cooperation existed between Vladimir’s son Iaroslav and the Tartu bishopric where his in-law Hermann, another brother of Theoderich, was the bishop. At the time, many of those who were forced into political exile from Pskov and Novgorod sought refuge in Otepää castle in Tartu diocese. Finally, in cooperation with the bishopric, Iaroslav’s claim to the Pskov throne led to the Livonians seizing power in Pskov in 1240, and this, in turn, resulted in the famous “Battle on the Ice“ on Lake Peipus in 1242.

The following – fictional – text attempts to present the way in which Vladimir himself could have looked at his successes and failures at the end of his life around 1230.

Notes