Peter the Great and the Lavra

In 1724 Peter the Great had the relics of Alexander Nevsky carried in solemn procession from Vladimir, where they had lain since 1263, to a new monastery he had founded in his new capital on the Neva. The translation was an act of imperial stagecraft: Peter timed the relics’ arrival to 30 August, the anniversary of the 1721 Treaty of Nystad that ended his long war with Sweden, and so recast the medieval prince who had beaten the Swedes on the Neva in 1240 as the heavenly patron of his anti-Swedish Baltic capital and its hard-won victory. This file follows the founding of the monastery, the translation and its new feast, Peter’s deliberate de-monasticization of the saint’s image, the silver shrine of the Elizabethan years, and the chivalric order that bore Alexander’s name — the imperial repurposing of the saint.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Right-Believing Prince)

The New Capital and the New Monastery

Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703 on the marshy delta of the Neva, the river on whose banks, in 1240, Alexander had won the victory that gave him his name. In 1710 Peter ordered the foundation of a monastery in the new city dedicated to Alexander Nevsky — the house that would become the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, raised to the rank of lavra in 1797 under Paul I (Hughes 1998; Schenk 2004). Siting a monastery to the warrior-prince of the Neva in the city on the Neva was a calculated gesture: it bound the new, raw, Westward-facing capital to the most resonant Orthodox precedent for a Russian victory over a Swedish enemy on this very ground (Schenk 2004; Hughes 1998).

The gesture rested on a geographical fiction, and the fiction is worth naming. The monastery was placed where tradition held the Neva battle to have occurred, but the actual site of the 1240 engagement lay elsewhere along the river system, at the mouth of the Izhora, some distance from the spot Peter chose:

[Disputed: whether the Alexander Nevsky Monastery stands on the actual site of the 1240 Battle of the Neva is doubtful. The monastery was founded on a site associated by tradition with the battle, but the engagement is generally located at the confluence of the Izhora and the Neva, a different and more upstream location; the topographical identification underlying the monastery's placement is thus a commemorative tradition rather than an established fact (Schenk 2004; Hughes 1998). The irony — a monument to the battle set near but not on the battlefield — is noted in the scholarship.]

For the present purpose the imprecision hardly mattered. What Peter needed was the association — the saint, the river, the Swedish foe — and the new monastery supplied it on the doorstep of the capital (Schenk 2004).

The Translation of the Relics, 1723–1724

The centerpiece of the program was the transfer of Alexander’s relics from the Nativity Monastery at Vladimir, where they had rested since 1263 and been recognized in the late fourteenth century, to the new monastery in St. Petersburg (Schenk 2004; Hughes 1998; on the Vladimir cult and the relics, see Glorification 1547). The relics were taken up and began their journey in 1723, and after a halt the procession brought them to St. Petersburg, where they arrived on 30 August 1724, received by Peter with the highest solemnity (Hughes 1998; Schenk 2004).

The date was not chosen for convenience. 30 August was the anniversary of the Treaty of Nystad, signed 30 August (Old Style) 1721, which ended the Great Northern War and sealed Russia’s victory over Sweden — the war that had cost Peter two decades and won him the Baltic provinces and the status of emperor (Hughes 1998; Martin 2007; Schenk 2004). By fixing the arrival of the relics to that anniversary, Peter fused two anti-Swedish triumphs across five centuries: Alexander’s defeat of the Swedes on the Neva in 1240 and his own defeat of the Swedes that the peace of 1721 had crowned. The medieval warrior-prince became the patron-saint of the modern Baltic victory and of the capital built to face the Baltic. The act was, in the most precise sense, the imperial repurposing of the saint: a thirteenth-century cult enlisted to consecrate an eighteenth-century empire (Schenk 2004; Hughes 1998).

A new feast was established to mark the event — the Translation of the Relics of St. Alexander Nevsky, commemorated on 30 August — which entered the Russian calendar alongside the older day of his repose (Schenk 2004; on the feasts, see Feasts and Iconography). The new feast was thus itself a memorial of Nystad as much as of the saint, the liturgical year made to carry the dynasty’s geopolitical triumph.

The De-Monasticization of the Image

Peter’s intervention reached even into how the saint might be painted. The image of Alexander that the Life and the older tradition transmitted culminated in his deathbed tonsure: the warrior-prince who, dying, received the monastic schema and was buried as the schema-monk Alexis (Life of Alexander Nevsky; trans. Zenkovsky 1974; see Warrior or Monk?). This monastic ending had naturally shaped a strand of his iconography, which could show him in the schema, as a tonsured monk. For Peter’s purposes this was exactly wrong. The empire wanted not an ascetic but a soldier-statesman — a princely warrior-patron fit for a military capital and a victorious dynasty — and Peter accordingly directed that Alexander be depicted in princely, grand-ducal robes rather than in monastic habit (Schenk 2004; Hughes 1998).

[Disputed: the precise content, wording, and date of Peter's instruction that Alexander be depicted as a prince rather than a monk are not uniformly transmitted. The substance — an imperial-era directive (commonly placed in the 1720s, and frequently associated with a Synodal decree of 1724) discouraging the monastic/schema image in favor of princely, grand-ducal dress — is well attested as the policy that reshaped the saint's iconography; the exact form of the order, and how much of it derives from Peter personally versus the Holy Synod acting in his program, are reported variously (Schenk 2004; Hughes 1998). It is given here as the attested policy of Peter's program rather than as a verbatim decree.]

The effect was a deliberate secularization of the holy image: the saint stripped of the monastic sign that pointed to renunciation and re-clothed in the regalia of the warrior-ruler the state wished to venerate. It is the iconographic counterpart of the whole translation — the same recasting of a penitent monk-prince into an imperial military patron, now carried into paint and metal (Schenk 2004; on the resulting image-debate, see Feasts and Iconography and the source-critical treatment in Warrior or Monk?).

The Silver Shrine and the Order

The imperial cult Peter founded was magnified by his successors. Under the Empress Elizabeth (reigned 1741–1762), Peter’s daughter, a vast silver shrine and reliquary (raka) was commissioned for Alexander’s relics in the monastery — a baroque ensemble of nearly a ton and a half of silver, completed in the 1750s (commonly dated to its installation in 1752–1753), drawn from the output of the Kolyvan mines and ranking among the great treasures of imperial church art (Hughes 1998; Schenk 2004). The shrine made permanent and splendid what the 1724 translation had begun: the saint enthroned in silver at the heart of the capital, a monument of dynastic devotion as much as of veneration.

To the cult Peter also joined a chivalric order. The Imperial Order of St. Alexander Nevsky had been part of Peter’s design as a military decoration, and it was instituted in 1725, shortly after his death, by his widow and successor Catherine I, carrying out his intention (Hughes 1998; Schenk 2004). The order made the saint the patron of a corps of imperial servants and officers, extending his name into the honors system of the state and binding the prestige of the medieval prince to the rewards of the modern empire — a further turn of the same instrumentalizing logic. (The name and prestige would prove durable enough that the Soviet state, having abolished the imperial order, revived an Order of Alexander Nevsky as a military decoration in 1942, on which see Eisenstein and the Soviet Icon.)

The Saint the Empire Made

Taken together, the foundation of 1710, the translation of 1724, the new feast of 30 August, the de-monasticized image, the silver shrine, and the chivalric order constitute a single coherent act of memory-work: the conversion of Alexander Nevsky from the holy prince of Vladimir and the national saint of Muscovy into the imperial patron of Petrine Russia (Schenk 2004; Hughes 1998). Where the Macarian glorification of 1547 had made him a saint of the nation, Peter made him a saint of the state in its new, European, Baltic-facing form — and did so by reaching past the monk Alexis to the warrior of the Neva, exactly the choice the saint’s own Life had left open (Schenk 2004; see Glorification 1547 and The Saint and the Nation).

The discipline this collection keeps applies here as elsewhere: the prince of 1240, the saint of 1547, and the imperial patron of 1724 are distinct constructions, and Peter’s translation belongs as much to the history of Russian statecraft and self-presentation as to the history of devotion (METHODOLOGY §4; Schenk 2004). The relics that arrived on the Neva on the anniversary of Nystad were venerated as a saint’s and deployed as an emperor’s; both are part of the record, and the second is the particular subject of this file.

References

The Life of Alexander Nevsky, in Serge A. Zenkovsky, ed. and trans. Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. Rev. ed. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974. (The deathbed tonsure and burial as the schema-monk Alexis, the monastic image Peter’s program displaced.)
Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. Aleksandr Nevskij: Heiliger – Fürst – Nationalheld. Eine Erinnerungsfigur im russischen kulturellen Gedächtnis (1263–2000). Cologne: Böhlau, 2004. (The definitive study of the imperial repurposing: the founding of the monastery, the 1724 translation timed to the Nystad anniversary, the new feast, the de-monasticization of the iconography, the Elizabethan shrine, and the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky.)
Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. (Peter’s St. Petersburg, the Great Northern War and the Treaty of Nystad of 1721, the foundation of the monastery, the translation of the relics, and the cult of Alexander Nevsky in Petrine ideology.)
Martin, Janet. Medieval Russia 980–1584. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (Background on Alexander, the Neva victory, and the medieval cult later repurposed; the long view against which the Petrine act stands.)