The Sons of Vladimir

Boris and Gleb were two of the many sons of Vladimir of Kiev, born into the first Christian generation of the Rus’ dynasty and assigned the provincial seats of Rostov and Murom. Their mother, their birth-order, and even the spelling of their baptismal names (Roman and David) reach us through sources written a century or more after the events and shaped by the cult that came to surround them. This file sets out what the Primary Chronicle and the hagiography report of the brothers’ origins and their place in Vladimir’s sprawling family, distinguishing the secure from the legendary.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)

The Family of Vladimir

The Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kiev in the early twelfth century, presents Vladimir Sviatoslavich (d. 1015) as the father of a large brood of sons by several wives and concubines, gathered before his baptism in 988. Under the year 980 the Chronicle lists his unions and enumerates his sons: by a “Greek woman” (the former wife of his brother Yaropolk) he had Sviatopolk; by Rogned of Polotsk, Iziaslav, Mstislav, Yaroslav, and Vsevolod; by a “Czech woman,” Vysheslav; by another, Sviatoslav and Mstislav; and “by a Bulgarian woman, Boris and Gleb” (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 980; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The list is schematic and its details are not wholly consistent across the manuscript tradition, but it establishes the essential point: Boris and Gleb were among the younger sons, and the Chronicle assigns them a single mother distinct from the mothers of the senior princes.

The identity of that mother is uncertain. The Chronicle’s “Bulgarian woman” (bolgarynia) has been read both as a Volga Bulgar and as a Danube (Balkan) Bulgarian, and the question bears on the brothers’ standing, since a Byzantine-leaning maternal line would have given them a different weight in the dynasty (Franklin and Shepard 1996, on Vladimir’s marriages). A separate and later tradition, reflected in some redactions of the hagiography and in the genealogical reasoning of modern scholars, has sought to make Boris and Gleb sons of Vladimir’s Christian Byzantine wife Anna, the sister of the emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII whom Vladimir married around 988 — a claim that would make them “born in the purple” and explain the special honor of their cult [Disputed: the Primary Chronicle (s.a. 980) names their mother a “Bulgarian woman” and places the union among Vladimir’s pre-baptismal marriages; some scholars (and a strand of later tradition) have proposed instead that Boris and Gleb were sons of the porphyrogenita Anna, born after 988, which would make them the youngest and most prestigious of the sons, but the chronicle evidence does not support this and most historians, with Poppe and Lenhoff, treat the Bulgarian-mother notice as the earliest datum]. The honest position is that the sources fix the brothers’ father securely and their mother only loosely.

Boris and Gleb Among the Brothers

Within this family Boris and Gleb stand out in the record only because of their deaths; before 1015 they are minor figures. The Primary Chronicle, under the year 988, records Vladimir’s distribution of seats among his sons — the system by which the senior prince placed his children as sub-rulers across the lands of the Rus’. In that distribution Vladimir “set Vysheslav in Novgorod, Iziaslav in Polotsk, Sviatopolk in Turov, and Yaroslav in Rostov,” and as deaths and reassignments followed, the seats shifted; by the end of Vladimir’s reign Boris held Rostov and Gleb held Murom, both on the upper Volga and Oka frontier of the Rus’ lands (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). These were not central seats. Rostov and Murom lay at the northeastern edge of the realm, in territory only lightly Christianized and still being brought under Kievan control, which makes the brothers provincial princes of the second rank rather than designated heirs.

The hagiographical tradition would later magnify Boris in particular. The Skazanie presents him as Vladimir’s especially beloved son, on whom the aging prince looked with favor, and it is precisely this favor — and a hint that Vladimir may have intended Boris for the succession over the elder Sviatopolk — that gives the Skazanie’s plot its motive (Hollingsworth 1992, translating the Skazanie; on the literary shaping, Lenhoff 1989). Whether Vladimir genuinely preferred Boris cannot be confirmed from any independent source; it is a feature of the tale rather than a datum, and it serves the narrative need to explain why Boris, and not another, became the first target.

The Baptismal Names and the Birth-Order

The brothers bore Slavic dynastic names — Boris and Gleb — alongside the Christian names received at baptism: Boris was baptized Roman, and Gleb was baptized David (Hollingsworth 1992, translating the Skazanie and Chtenie; the names appear in the liturgical and hagiographical tradition). The Christian names are themselves significant, for the cult would be served by both registers: the princely Slavic names that rooted the saints in the dynasty, and the baptismal names that marked them as Christians. The pairing of the two name-sets is one of the markers by which the brothers’ cult fused dynastic and ecclesial identity.

The birth-order of Boris and Gleb is reported consistently in the tradition — Boris the elder, Gleb the younger — and the narrative of 1015 depends on it: Boris is killed first, and Gleb, the younger and less prepared, is lured to his death afterward. But the absolute ages of the brothers are not securely known. The hagiography presents Boris as a grown man with a retinue and a military command, and Gleb as notably younger, even boyish, in the Skazanie‘s portrait of his pleading with his killers (Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on the literary portrait of Gleb’s youth). The texts’ interest is in their meekness, not their chronology, and the dating of their births is a reconstruction rather than a record.

What the Foundations Establish

For the purpose of the whole collection, the foundations yield a small but firm core. Boris and Gleb were younger sons of Vladimir of Kiev, raised Christian in the dynasty’s first Christian generation, holding the provincial seats of Rostov and Murom at their father’s death, bearing the baptismal names Roman and David. Beyond that core — the identity of their mother, their exact ages, the depth of Vladimir’s reported favor toward Boris — the record thins into tradition, and the careful reader keeps the distinction. What gives these otherwise minor princes their place in history is not their lives but the manner of their deaths, and the meaning the Church of Rus’ found in them (see The Succession Crisis of 1015 and The Killing of Boris).

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The list of Vladimir’s sons s.a. 980; the distribution of seats s.a. 988.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie; the baptismal names Roman and David; the portrait of Boris and Gleb.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The literary portrait of the brothers, esp. Gleb’s youth.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The literary shaping of Boris as favored son; the cult’s fusion of dynastic and Christian identity.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (Vladimir’s marriages; the question of the brothers’ mother; the appanage system.)