The Succession Crisis of 1015

The deaths of Boris and Gleb arose directly from the violent, undefined succession that followed the death of Vladimir of Kiev on 15 July 1015. The Rus’ had no fixed law of inheritance; the throne of Kiev was contested among Vladimir’s surviving sons, and the man who seized the city first — Svyatopolk, in the tradition’s telling — moved at once to eliminate rivals. This file sets out the political mechanics of the crisis: the absence of a settled succession, the seizure of Kiev, the alignment of the brothers, and the strategic logic that made the popular Boris the first to die.

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

A Throne Without a Law

The Rus’ polity that Vladimir left in 1015 had no rule of single succession. The lands were held collectively by the ruling clan, with sons placed as sub-rulers in the provincial centers and the senior seat of Kiev passing to whichever prince could take and hold it. This lateral, clan-based system — later formalized, imperfectly, into the so-called rota or “ladder” of seniority — meant that the death of a grand prince regularly opened a period of armed competition among brothers and cousins (Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the succession structure of Kievan Rus’). Vladimir himself had come to power in just such a war, defeating and killing his brother Yaropolk around 978–980 (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 980; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The pattern of fratricidal succession was thus already established in the dynasty, and the events of 1015 fell into it.

Two of Vladimir’s sons were, by the end of his reign, already in open or latent conflict with him. Yaroslav, placed at Novgorod, had refused in 1014 to forward the annual tribute due to Kiev and was preparing for war with his father; Vladimir was reportedly mustering an army against Novgorod when he fell ill (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1014–1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Svyatopolk, placed at Turov and married to a daughter of the Polish ruler Bolesław I, had earlier been imprisoned by Vladimir, according to the tradition, on suspicion of conspiracy (the Chronicle and the German chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg both preserve notices of friction between Vladimir and Svyatopolk; Franklin and Shepard 1996). The dynasty, in other words, was already fracturing when its head died.

The Death of Vladimir and the Seizure of Kiev

Vladimir died on 15 July 1015 at his country residence of Berestovo, near Kiev (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The Chronicle reports that his death was at first concealed: his retainers wrapped the body and removed it secretly by night, “for Svyatopolk was in Kiev,” and those loyal to other sons did not want him to seize the advantage of the news (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The detail is telling — the very manner of reporting the prince’s death is governed by the expectation of a succession struggle.

Svyatopolk, present in or near the capital, took Kiev. The Chronicle and the Skazanie present him as moving immediately to consolidate, distributing largess to the Kievans to buy their loyalty and, crucially, turning to the removal of his brothers (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). In the tradition’s account, his first and most dangerous rival was not the distant, rebellious Yaroslav at Novgorod but the nearer and more popular Boris.

Why Boris First

At the moment of Vladimir’s death, Boris was absent from Kiev on campaign. The Chronicle reports that Vladimir, ill, had sent Boris out at the head of the Kievan host against the Pechenegs, the steppe nomads who pressed the southern frontier; Boris had not found the enemy and was returning when news reached him that his father was dead and Svyatopolk had taken the city (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). This is the strategically decisive fact of the crisis. Boris had with him the army of Kiev — a real force — and he commanded popular sympathy. His retainers urged him to march on Kiev and take the throne, telling him the druzhina (the princely retinue) and the troops were his (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). Boris at the head of the Kievan host was the one man who could have unseated Svyatopolk by force.

It is exactly here that the tradition’s portrait of sanctity and the cold logic of the succession converge. For Svyatopolk, Boris was the immediate threat: a rival with an army, a claim, and the people’s favor, encamped within reach of the capital. For the hagiographer, Boris’s refusal to use that army against his brother — his decision to dismiss the host and submit rather than shed a brother’s blood — is the act that makes him a saint (see The Killing of Boris and A New Category of Sanctity). The succession crisis supplies the political stakes; the passion-bearer ideal supplies the meaning the Church gave to Boris’s response to them.

The Wider War

The killings of Boris and Gleb were the opening moves of a longer war, not its whole. After their deaths — and, the tradition adds, the death of a third brother, Svyatoslav, who fled toward Hungary and was overtaken and killed — the contest narrowed to Svyatopolk against Yaroslav (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015–1019; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Yaroslav marched from Novgorod with Varangian and Novgorodian troops; Svyatopolk drew on Pecheneg and, later, Polish support from his father-in-law Bolesław I. The war ran from 1016 to 1019, with Kiev changing hands more than once, until Yaroslav’s victory at the river Alta in 1019 — pointedly, the same river on which Boris had been killed — secured him the throne (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1016–1019; Franklin and Shepard 1996). Svyatopolk fled and died; the tradition gave him the epithet Okayanny, “the Accursed,” forever binding his name to the murder of his brothers.

That outcome — Yaroslav the victor, Svyatopolk the damned fugitive — is itself part of why the question of who really ordered the killings is contested. The narrative that survives is the narrative of the winning side, composed under the dynasty Yaroslav founded; the case that the saga evidence raises against Yaroslav himself, and the scholarship for and against it, are taken up in their own place (see Who Killed Them).

See Also

References

  • Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (Vladimir’s death 15 July 1015; the concealment of the death; Boris on campaign against the Pechenegs; the war of 1016–1019 and Yaroslav’s victory at the Alta.)
  • Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie‘s account of Svyatopolk’s seizure of Kiev and of Boris’s retainers urging him to take the throne.)
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The clan-based succession system; the Vladimir–Yaroslav and Vladimir–Svyatopolk frictions; the course of the war of 1016–1019.)