The Martyrs as Protectors

The tradition of Boris and Gleb as heavenly patrons and protectors of the Rus’ princely house and the land — and the development, layered onto the passion-bearer ideal, of a “warrior-protector” dimension in which the brothers who would not lift a hand against their kinsman become martial helpers of later princes. The best-known instance is the vision recorded in the Life of Alexander Nevsky, in which the watchman Pelgusii sees Boris and Gleb passing in a boat, coming to help “their kinsman Alexander” on the eve of the Battle of the Neva in 1240. The vision and the protective tradition are reported here as the claims of the sources that record them — above all the Life of Alexander Nevsky — pinned to those texts and not asserted as fact.

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

From Sufferers to Patrons

The earliest layer of the cult, carried by the Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie, presents Boris and Gleb as healers and intercessors — saints whose tomb at Vyshgorod gives sight to the blind and looses the bonds of prisoners (see The Healing Miracles). But a second dimension grew over the first, and it is in some tension with the brothers’ founding character. The passion-bearers were venerated precisely because they had refused to fight: Boris dismissed the Kievan host rather than turn it against Svyatopolk, and the meaning the Church found in their deaths lay in voluntary, Christ-like non-resistance (see A New Category of Sanctity and The Killing of Boris). Yet the same brothers came, in the developing tradition, to be invoked as protectors of the princely house and, more strikingly still, as helpers in battle — heavenly allies who come to the aid of their descendants and kinsmen in war (Fedotov 1946, on the warrior-protector strand layered over the passion-bearer ideal; Lenhoff 1989, on the cult’s princely-dynastic function).

The seed of this development lies already in the early sources. As princely saints — sons of Vladimir, members of the ruling clan — Boris and Gleb were from the first natural patrons of their own dynasty, and the cult that Yaroslav and his successors promoted bound the brothers to the legitimacy and protection of the Riurikid house (Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the dynastic uses of the cult). The freeing of prisoners in the miracle collection already pointed beyond healing toward a patronage exercised in the world of power (see The Healing Miracles). What the later tradition did was to carry this patronage onto the battlefield, so that the unresisting martyrs became, paradoxically, guardians of the princes’ wars — a transformation the texts narrate as the natural outflow of the brothers’ glorification, and which the modern reader registers as a real shift in the cult’s content (Fedotov 1946).

The Pattern in the Primary Chronicle

The conviction that the brothers protect their kin appears in the chronicle tradition well before the famous thirteenth-century vision. The Russian Primary Chronicle, around the solemn translation of the relics in 1072, presents Boris and Gleb as the realm’s intercessors and guardians, calling on them as protectors of the Rus’ land and of its princes (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1072; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Fedotov 1946). The brothers are invoked in the chronicle’s prayers as those who watch over the dynasty and ward off its enemies, and later chroniclers attribute princely victories and deliverances in part to their heavenly aid (Lenhoff 1989, on the chronicle’s framing of the brothers as dynastic patrons; Franklin and Shepard 1996). This is the matrix from which the battlefield vision emerges: by the thirteenth century the brothers were long established in the tradition as guardians of the princely line, so that a prince in danger could be imagined as one to whom they would naturally come.

This pattern of invocation appears in several princely contexts across the centuries — Boris and Gleb named in prayers before campaigns, credited with deliverances, set on the banners and seals of princes, and depicted in the iconography as armed and mounted warriors flanking and protecting their house (on the warrior iconography, see Iconography and Churches). The depiction of the passion-bearers as armed horsemen is itself the visual register of the warrior-protector strand: the saints who would not fight are shown bearing the sword in defense of the land (Fedotov 1946; Lenhoff 1989). All of this is the tradition’s testimony to the brothers’ patronage, reported here as such and not certified as historical agency, in keeping with METHODOLOGY.md §3.5.

The Vision Before the Neva

The most celebrated expression of the warrior-protector tradition is the vision reported in the Life of Alexander Nevsky, the thirteenth-century hagiographic life of the prince that survives within the Russian chronicle and hagiographic tradition. The Life sets the vision on the eve of the Battle of the Neva, fought in 1240 against a Swedish force at the mouth of the Izhora where it meets the Neva, when the young prince Alexander Yaroslavich of Novgorod won the victory that earned him the name “Nevsky” (the Life of Alexander Nevsky; on the battle and its hagiography, see St. Alexander Nevsky).

The Life tells that a man named Pelgusii (Pelguy), a commander of the coastal guard in the region of the Izhora — in the telling a newly baptized Christian among a still partly pagan people — kept watch through the night before the battle. As dawn approached he saw a boat upon the water, and in it two radiant figures, and he recognized them as the holy martyrs Boris and Gleb, arrayed in the manner of their iconography. One of the brothers, the Life reports, spoke to the other, saying that they should hasten to help “their kinsman Alexander” (srodnik, their relative — for Alexander, as a Riurikid prince, was of the same princely house as the sons of Vladimir). Then the boat passed on out of Pelgusii’s sight. The watchman reported the vision to Alexander, who bade him tell no one, and went on to his victory (the Life of Alexander Nevsky; recounted in Fedotov 1946 and Lenhoff 1989). The vision is the hagiographer’s sign that heaven fought for Alexander, and that the agents of that help were the first martyrs of the dynasty, coming to the aid of one of their own blood.

Two features of the Life‘s account deserve note. First, the brothers come by boat — a detail suited both to the riverine battle at the Neva and to the iconography and earlier narrative associations of the saints, and the boat passes on without their joining the fight directly, so that their “aid” remains a heavenly presence and assurance rather than a depicted feat of arms (Fedotov 1946). Second, the motive the Life puts in the brothers’ mouths is kinship: they come because Alexander is their srodnik, their kinsman of the princely house — which makes the vision the clearest statement of the brothers’ role as dynastic protectors, helping their descendants because they are of one clan (Lenhoff 1989). The whole episode is reported by the Life of Alexander Nevsky as its testimony; it is pinned here to that text and is not asserted as an event of history (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Tension and the Lateness of the Layer

The warrior-protector tradition sits in real tension with the passion-bearer ideal, and the honest reading of the cult must name it. The brothers were declared holy for not resisting, for laying down the sword and accepting death at a kinsman’s hand; the developed tradition turns them into helpers in their kinsmen’s battles. Fedotov treated this as a genuine transformation of the cult’s meaning — the gentle, unresisting sufferers reconceived, under the pressures of a princely society at war, as martial guardians of the dynasty and the land (Fedotov 1946, on the militarization of the passion-bearer image). The tension is not a flaw to be explained away but a datum about how the cult grew: a saint’s meaning is shaped by the needs of those who venerate him, and a dynasty that needed protectors made protectors of its martyrs.

The lateness of the battlefield layer relative to the founding passion narrative is itself a point on which the evidence and the scholarship must be weighed. [Disputed: the vision of Boris and Gleb coming to aid Alexander at the Neva is attested in the *Life of Alexander Nevsky*, a hagiographic work of the later thirteenth century composed after the events of 1240, and not in any source contemporary with the battle; Fedotov (1946) and Lenhoff (1989) read it as a developed, dynastic-protector elaboration of the cult layered well after the eleventh-century passion and miracle traditions, reflecting the needs of the princely house rather than an eyewitness report, while the *Life* itself presents it as the testimony of the watchman Pelgusii — the historicity of the vision as event is therefore not established, and it is treated here as a thirteenth-century hagiographic layer pinned to the *Life*, in keeping with METHODOLOGY §3.5]. The dating and growth of these strata of the legend are examined more fully in their own place (see Dating and Embellishment); for the purpose of this file the essential point is that the warrior-protector tradition is a real and important development of the cult, attested in named texts, and reported as their claim rather than as fact.

Invocation in Other Princely Contexts

Beyond the Neva vision, Boris and Gleb were invoked across the medieval Rus’ world as patrons of princes and of the land in a range of contexts. They were taken as protectors in dynastic struggles and in war against external enemies; churches and monasteries were dedicated to them at princely centers; their feast was kept as a feast of the realm; and their names were attached to the legitimacy of rulers who claimed their patronage (Lenhoff 1989, on the breadth of the cult’s princely invocation; Franklin and Shepard 1996). In the iconographic tradition the brothers are most often shown together, in princely dress, frequently armed and sometimes mounted — the very image of saintly guardians of the dynasty (see Iconography and Churches). In all of this the brothers function as the heavenly counterpart of the earthly princely order: as the first holy members of the ruling house, they are its natural intercessors and protectors, and the appeal to them in war and danger is the logical extension of that role (Fedotov 1946; Lenhoff 1989).

What unites the protective tradition from the Primary Chronicle‘s prayers of 1072 to the Life of Alexander Nevsky‘s vision is the conviction that the murdered brothers continue to watch over their kin and their land — a conviction that the texts express as fact within their own world and that this account reports as their testimony. The transformation of the unresisting passion-bearers into protectors and even battlefield helpers is one of the most striking features of their cult, and it is best understood not as a contradiction concealed but as the visible record of how a saint’s veneration is reshaped by those who carry it forward across the centuries (see Legacy in Russian Spirituality). The brothers remain, in the end, what the earliest tradition made them — sufferers in the likeness of Christ — and the warrior-protector dimension is the dynasty’s answer to its own need, laid over that older holiness and reported here, like every wonder in this section, as the claim of the sources that preserve it (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

See Also

References

  • The Life of Alexander Nevsky. (The thirteenth-century hagiographic life, surviving within the Russian chronicle and hagiographic tradition; the vision of the watchman Pelgusii [Pelguy], who sees Boris and Gleb coming by boat to aid “their kinsman Alexander” before the Battle of the Neva in 1240.)
  • Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The invocation of Boris and Gleb as protectors of the Rus’ land and its princes around the translation of the relics, s.a. 1072.)
  • Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie; the brothers as intercessors for the princely house.)
  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The warrior-protector strand layered over the passion-bearer ideal; the militarization of the brothers’ image; the Neva vision as a developed elaboration of the cult.)
  • Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The dynastic-protector function of the cult; the breadth of princely invocation; the Neva vision within the cult’s development.)
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The dynastic uses of the cult of Boris and Gleb in Kievan Rus’.)