The Killing of Boris

Boris, returning from a fruitless campaign against the Pechenegs, learned of his father’s death and his elder brother Svyatopolk’s seizure of Kiev; his retainers urged him to march on the city and take the throne by force, but he refused to raise his hand against his elder brother, dismissed the host, and kept vigil in prayer in his tent by the river Alta. There, in the night, men sent by Svyatopolk — the boyars of Vyshgorod, Putsha and others named in the Skazanie — speared him through the tent-cloth; the killing was not finished at once, and Boris was carried off still breathing and dispatched by two Varangians. This file narrates that death as the tradition tells it, pinned throughout to its three sources, with the date placed by the tradition at 24 July.

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

The Return from the Pechenegs

At the moment of Vladimir’s death on 15 July 1015, Boris was not in Kiev. His father, falling ill, had sent him out at the head of the Kievan host against the Pechenegs, the steppe nomads who pressed the southern frontier of the Rus’ (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). Boris did not find the enemy. The Chronicle and the Skazanie agree that he was returning from the campaign — having “not encountered” or “not found” the Pechenegs — when the news overtook him on the way: his father was dead, and his elder brother Svyatopolk had taken the city (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). This is the situation in which the whole drama is set. Boris was a grown prince with an army at his back, near enough to Kiev to act, and he had just learned that the throne had passed, by seizure, to a brother.

The Skazanie dwells at length, where the Chronicle is terse, on Boris’s grief at the news of Vladimir’s death. It gives him a long interior lament for his father, in which the prince weeps that he has no one to turn to and resolves to seek the protection of his elder brother in his father’s place (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; on the Skazanie‘s amplification of the laments, Fedotov 1946; Lenhoff 1989). The hagiographer’s interest is already plain: the political fact — a prince with a host, hearing of a contested succession — is being transposed into a drama of filial and fraternal piety. The two registers, the political and the hagiographical, run together from here to the end, and the careful reader keeps them distinguished even while following the tradition’s narrative.

The Retainers’ Counsel and Boris’s Refusal

It is here that the decisive scene of the tradition unfolds. Boris’s druzhina — his armed retinue, and with it the Kievan troops he had led on campaign — urged him to use the force he had. The Skazanie and the Chronicle both report the retainers pressing him to march on Kiev and take the throne, telling him that the men and the army were his, that he had the strength to seize the city (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The military logic was sound. Boris at the head of the Kievan host was, of all Vladimir’s sons, the one best placed to unseat Svyatopolk by arms; this is the strategically decisive fact of the whole crisis (see The Succession Crisis of 1015).

Boris refused. In the tradition’s telling, he would not raise his hand against his elder brother. The sense of his answer — paraphrased here, since the wording differs between the texts and across editions — is that he will not lift his hand against his elder brother: now that his father is dead, let Svyatopolk stand to him in his father’s place (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The refusal is grounded, in the Skazanie, in an explicitly Christian reasoning: Boris meditates on the vanity of worldly power, on the deaths of the great men of old who gained kingdoms and then perished, and on the example of Christ, and he resolves that it is better to suffer wrong than to do it — that he will not be the one to begin the shedding of a brother’s blood (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on the passion-bearer reasoning here; Lenhoff 1989). Nestor’s Chtenie, the more “Byzantine” of the hagiographies, frames the same refusal in the language of a martyr choosing not to resist (Nestor, Chtenie, in Hollingsworth 1992).

This act — the refusal to use a real army against a brother — is the hinge on which the saint’s whole significance turns. For the political historian it is the moment Boris removed himself as a military threat; for the hagiographer it is the moment he became a saint. The two readings are not in competition so much as superimposed, and the theological meaning the Church drew from the refusal is taken up in its own place (see A New Category of Sanctity).

The Dismissal of the Host

The refusal had a consequence the sources record without softening: the army left him. Once Boris made plain that he would not march on Kiev, the host that had urged him to fight dispersed. The Chronicle reports tersely that the soldiers departed from him, leaving Boris with only his personal attendants; the Skazanie presents the same outcome, with Boris in effect dismissing or releasing the troops who would not follow him into mere submission (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). Whether the emphasis falls on Boris sending the army away or on the army deserting a prince who would not fight, the result is identical and is the necessary precondition of what follows: Boris, who an hour before had commanded the Kievan host, was now nearly alone, defenseless, and within reach of his brother’s men.

The tradition reads this defenselessness as chosen. Boris does not flee, does not fortify, does not bargain; having put aside the one means by which he might have saved himself — the army — he waits. The Skazanie makes the waiting an act of deliberate self-offering, a conformity to Christ who “as a sheep before her shearers is dumb” did not resist those who came for him (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; the Isaian and Gospel resonance is drawn out by Fedotov 1946). The pattern is the same one the earliest martyr-literature had established for a true martyrdom — the refusal to provoke or to flee, the submission to the death that comes — and it is the pattern by which the Rus’ hagiographers signal that Boris’s death is to be read as a passion (compare the model of non-self-offering in the Martyrium Polycarpi).

The Vigil on the Alta

Boris encamped on the river Alta, a small tributary in the country south of Kiev (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The place would carry the memory of his death: it was on the Alta that Yaroslav would defeat Svyatopolk in 1019, on the very river where Boris had been killed, an irony the Chronicle marks (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1019; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). But on this night the Alta is the scene of a vigil.

The Skazanie gives the night in liturgical detail, and the detail is the hagiographer’s, offered as such. Boris, knowing or sensing that his death was being plotted, spent the night in prayer in his tent. He had matins sung; he wept and prayed before an icon of Christ, asking to be made worthy to suffer as the martyrs and the Lord had suffered, and commending his spirit; and he lay down in his tent expecting the men who would come (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on the Skazanie‘s extended prayer-scenes). These prayers are presented by the source as Boris’s own, and they are reported here as what the Skazanie attests rather than as recorded speech: the hagiographer is composing the interior of a martyr, in the manner of his genre, and the convention is to render the saint’s mind in prayer (Lenhoff 1989, on the literary character of the laments; METHODOLOGY §3.5). What is historically secure beneath the hagiography is only the bare frame — Boris encamped on the Alta, undefended, and was killed there in the night. The vigil is the tradition’s filling of that frame with the soul of a saint.

The Killers from Vyshgorod

Svyatopolk, in the tradition’s account, sent men to kill Boris, and the Skazanie names them. He summoned the boyars of Vyshgorod — the fortified town just north of Kiev that would become, fittingly, the site of the brothers’ shrine — and bound them to the deed; the Skazanie names their leader Putsha and lists others among the Vyshgorod men (the names appear variously in the manuscripts as Putsha, Talets, Yelovit, and Lyashko) sent by night to the Alta (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The Chronicle gives the same event more briefly, reporting that Svyatopolk sent men to do away with Boris (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953).

The killers came in the dark and fell on the tent. The Skazanie and the Chronicle agree on the manner: the assassins surrounded Boris’s tent and ran him through with spears, piercing him through the tent-cloth as he prayed or as he lay (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The Skazanie adds that a faithful servant of Boris, a young man named George the Hungarian (Georgii) who loved his master, threw himself over Boris’s body to shield him and was killed; the killers, unable to pull from his neck the golden torque Boris had given him, struck off his head to take it (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The detail of the devoted servant dying with his lord is part of the Skazanie‘s portrait, reported here as the source’s; it belongs to the hagiographer’s amplification of the scene rather than to the spare notice of the Chronicle.

“Carried Off Still Breathing”: The Killing Completed

The tradition is precise on one grim point: the speared Boris did not die at once. Both the Chronicle and the Skazanie report that, after he had been run through, Boris was still alive. In the Skazanie‘s telling he was wrapped in the tent-cloth or a covering, loaded onto a cart or carried off, and borne away still breathing toward Kiev or Vyshgorod (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). When it was seen that he yet lived — and, the Skazanie adds, when word of it reached Svyatopolk — two Varangians (Scandinavians in Svyatopolk’s service) were sent to finish him; one of them drew his sword and ran Boris through the heart, completing the killing (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The Chronicle and the Skazanie concur on this double stage of the death — the spearing at the tent, the dispatch by sword in transit — and the agreement of the two principal sources on so specific and unflattering a detail is one of the points where the narrative carries the texture of received tradition rather than free invention (Lenhoff 1989, on the shared narrative core of the texts).

The body was brought to Vyshgorod and there buried, the Skazanie says, by the church of St. Basil — the beginning of the cult that would gather at that place (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992).

The Date

The tradition places Boris’s death on 24 July, the day on which the brothers’ principal feast came to be kept (on the feast, see the veneration files of the collection). The Russian Primary Chronicle sets the killing in the year 1015, in the immediate aftermath of Vladimir’s death on 15 July, but its narrative does not supply a precise day-date for the murder in the way the liturgical calendar does; the 24 July date is the feast-day fixed by the cult and is the date the tradition assigns to the death (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; the feast-date in the liturgical tradition). [Disputed: the year 1015 is given by the Primary Chronicle (s.a. 1015) and is accepted by scholarship (Franklin and Shepard 1996); the day 24 July is the established feast-date of the cult and is the date the tradition assigns to Boris’s death, but it is a liturgical commemoration rather than a securely documented calendar-date of the event itself, and the sources do not allow the day to be fixed independently of the cult’s reckoning.]

What the Narrative Rests On

The killing of Boris reaches us through three works, all composed to venerate him, and the honest reckoning of the account keeps that fact in view. The Russian Primary Chronicle, under the year 1015, gives the connected political narrative — the campaign, the news, the dismissal of the host, the spearing, the dispatch by the Varangians (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The anonymous Skazanie gives the fullest and most devotional version, with the long laments and prayers, the named killers, and the faithful servant George (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). Nestor’s Chtenie gives a more rhetorically “Byzantine” treatment, recasting the same events in the idiom of the saints’ vitae (Nestor, Chtenie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The relationship and relative dating of these three are themselves a scholarly question (see The Primary Chronicle). And behind all three lies the contested historical question of who in fact ordered the killing — Svyatopolk “the Accursed,” as the unanimous Rus’ tradition holds, or, on the reading some have drawn from the Norse Eymundar þáttr, Yaroslav himself. What the tradition narrates of Boris’s last night is, in its developed form, a saint’s passion; what history can affirm beneath it is that Boris, a son of Vladimir with an army at his command, chose not to fight his brother and was killed for the throne he would not seize.

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The entry s.a. 1015: Boris on campaign against the Pechenegs; the news of Vladimir’s death and Svyatopolk’s seizure of Kiev; the retainers’ urging and Boris’s refusal; the desertion of the host; the encampment and killing on the Alta; the spearing through the tent; Boris carried off still alive and finished by the Varangians; the Alta as the site of Yaroslav’s victory s.a. 1019.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie i strast’ i pokhvala: Boris’s laments and vigil-prayers; the named Vyshgorod killers, Putsha and the others; the servant George the Hungarian; the double stage of the killing; the burial at Vyshgorod. Nestor’s Chtenie: the Byzantine recasting of the same events.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The passion-bearer reasoning of Boris’s refusal; the Skazanie’s extended prayer- and lament-scenes; the Christ-conformity of the death.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. UCLA Slavic Studies. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The literary character of the laments; the shared narrative core of the Chronicle and the Skazanie; the cult at Vyshgorod.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The political setting; the year 1015 and the course of the succession war; the historical kernel beneath the hagiography.)