Who Killed Them

The question on which the cult of Boris and Gleb stands or wavers: who ordered the killings of 1015? The unanimous Rus’ tradition — the Primary Chronicle, the Skazanie, and Nestor’s Chtenie — names their half-brother Svyatopolk “the Accursed,” and the near-contemporary German chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg lends the broad outline outside support. Against this stands a strand of modern scholarship, pressed most forcefully by the Russian historian N. N. Ilyin, that reads the Old Norse Eymundar þáttr as implicating Yaroslav the Wise — the war’s victor and the cult’s promoter — in the death of at least Boris. This file lays out both cases fully, with their advocates and their critics, and resolves nothing beyond what the scholarship holds.

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

Why the Question Is Live

Most saints’ deaths are not whodunits. The death of Boris and Gleb is, because the question of who ordered it bears directly on two reputations the Rus’ tradition has fixed in opposite directions: Svyatopolk, on whom the tradition heaped the epithet Okayanny, “the Accursed,” and Yaroslav, whom it remembered as “the Wise,” the great lawgiver and church-builder, and — not incidentally — the prince under whom the cult of his murdered brothers was promoted. The settled account makes Svyatopolk the murderer and Yaroslav the avenger and venerator. A counter-witness, the saga of Eymund, can be read to reverse the roles. Because the surviving Rus’ narrative is the narrative of the side that won the war of 1016–1019 and built the shrine at Vyshgorod, the historian cannot simply take its unanimity at face value; and because the counter-witness is a late and problematic heroic tale, the historian cannot simply prefer it either. The result is one of the genuinely open questions of early Rus’ history, and it is handled here per METHODOLOGY.md §4, with both positions given their advocates and their sources and no verdict asserted beyond the scholarship.

Side A — The Rus’ Tradition: Svyatopolk the Accursed

The unanimous testimony of the three texts

The standard account is not the report of one source but the agreement of all three of the foundational Rus’ texts. The Russian Primary Chronicle, under the year 1015, narrates that Svyatopolk, having seized Kiev on Vladimir’s death and bought the loyalty of the Kievans, resolved to kill his brothers and “began to deliberate how he might slay them all and possess the entire realm.” He sent men of Vyshgorod — Putsha and his fellows — to the river Alta, where they fell upon Boris in his tent and ran him through; and he afterward lured Gleb, sailing down toward Smolensk, to his death at the hands of Gleb’s own cook; and he hunted down the fleeing Svyatoslav, who was overtaken and killed in the Carpathians (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The Chronicle’s verdict on Svyatopolk is total: he is “the second Cain,” cursed of God, and his eventual flight and miserable death are read as divine retribution (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1019; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953).

The anonymous Skazanie (the Tale, Passion, and Encomium) tells the same story at greater length and with deeper hagiographical coloring, making Svyatopolk’s guilt the engine of its whole narrative: it is Svyatopolk who, gripped by envy and “the prompting of the devil,” sends the killers, and the Skazanie dwells on his accursedness as the dark foil to Boris’s and Gleb’s meekness (the Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). Nestor’s Chtenie (the Lesson), the more consciously “Byzantine” hagiography produced at the Caves monastery, likewise lays the killings squarely on Svyatopolk, though it differs from the Skazanie in arrangement and emphasis (Nestor’s Chtenie, in Hollingsworth 1992). On the identity of the murderer the three texts do not diverge at all. Whatever their differences of date, genre, and detail — differences taken up in The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie — they speak with one voice that Svyatopolk ordered the deaths.

That unanimity is the foundation of the cult. The brothers are venerated precisely as innocent victims of a fratricide they refused to resist; Svyatopolk’s guilt is not incidental to the passion-bearer ideal but constitutive of it (Fedotov 1946; and see A New Category of Sanctity, via The Formation of the Cult). To unsettle the identity of the murderer is therefore to touch the framing of the cult itself — which is one reason the question carries the charge it does.

Thietmar of Merseburg as outside support

The standard account does not rest on Rus’ sources alone. Thietmar of Merseburg, the Saxon bishop and chronicler whose Chronicon breaks off at his death in 1018, supplies a near-contemporary, geographically external notice of the Rus’ strife. Thietmar, writing within a few years of the events and drawing on the well-informed channels between Saxony, Poland, and Rus’, knows of the conflict among Vladimir’s sons, of Svyatopolk (his son-in-law-by-marriage connection to Bolesław I of Poland), and of the violence that attended the succession; his account, while compressed and not free of confusion, broadly corroborates a struggle in which Svyatopolk was a principal and a perpetrator of violence against his kin (Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon; discussed in Franklin and Shepard 1996). Thietmar is decisive for one thing above all: he is independent of the Rus’ hagiographical tradition and earlier than all of it. He shows that the broad shape of the standard account — a murderous succession struggle with Svyatopolk at its center — was known outside Rus’, and known early, before the cult had time to construct it. This external anchor is the strongest card in the standard account’s hand, and the revisionist case must reckon with it.

What Thietmar does not do is narrate the specific killings of Boris and Gleb as martyrdoms, or name Svyatopolk as the man who ordered each death; his notice is general where the Rus’ texts are particular. The standard account’s defenders take Thietmar as confirming the frame within which the Rus’ detail sits; a sceptic may note that the frame is all Thietmar gives, and that the particular assignment of the murders to Svyatopolk still rests on the later, cult-shaped Rus’ texts. Both observations are fair, and both are part of the honest state of the evidence.

Side B — The Saga-Based Revision: The Case Against Yaroslav

The Eymundar þáttr

The counter-witness is a single, very different kind of text. The Eymundar þáttr — “the Tale of Eymund,” also called Eymund’s Saga, preserved in the late-fourteenth-century Icelandic compilation Flateyjarbók — recounts the deeds of a Norwegian warrior, Eymund Hringsson, who with a band of Varangians takes service with “King Yarisleif” (readily identified as Yaroslav) in Rus’. In Yarisleif’s war against his brother “Burizleif/Burizlaf,” Eymund and his men, finding their employer unwilling or unable to make an end of the rival prince, undertake the killing themselves: in the saga’s most pointed episode they ambush Burizleif and bring his head to Yarisleif, having been commissioned — or at least permitted and rewarded — to do so (the Eymundar þáttr (Eymund’s Saga), in Flateyjarbók). The saga is a heroic tale told from the Varangians’ point of view, concerned to celebrate Eymund’s prowess and cunning, and it shows no interest in martyrdom, sanctity, or the moral framing that dominates the Rus’ texts.

The revisionist argument

From this text a line of modern scholarship — pressed most fully by the Russian historian N. N. Ilyin in the mid-twentieth century, and entertained in various forms by others since — builds a case that it was Yaroslav, not Svyatopolk, who was responsible for the death of at least Boris. The argument has several strands, and at its strongest it runs as follows.

First, identification: “Burizleif,” the prince whom Eymund’s men kill in Yarisleif’s/Yaroslav’s service, can be read as Boris. The name-form is closer to “Boris” than to any other prince’s, and the saga makes Burizleif the brother and rival whom Yarisleif fights and finally has killed — structurally the role the Rus’ tradition assigns to Boris as Yaroslav’s rival-by-proxy (Ilyin’s reading, as discussed in Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996). On this reading the saga preserves, in garbled Norse dress, a memory that Yaroslav’s own Varangian mercenaries killed Boris.

Second, motive and means: Yaroslav was the ultimate victor of the war of 1016–1019, the prince who took and held Kiev, and the patron under whom the cult of the murdered brothers was promoted and the surviving narrative shaped. He thus had both the motive to clear rivals from his path and, as victor and cult-promoter, the means and the opportunity to write himself out of the record and write Svyatopolk into it. The revisionist points out that the entire standard account is the account of Yaroslav’s winning side: the Primary Chronicle was compiled under his dynasty, the Skazanie and Chtenie within the cult he fostered. A narrative in which the man who profited most from the killings is also the man who avenged and sanctified the victims is, the revisionist argues, exactly the narrative a victor would commission.

Third, independence: the saga, whatever its faults, is independent of the Rus’ hagiographical tradition. It descends through an entirely separate, Scandinavian channel, it has no stake in the Rus’ cult, and it is therefore, the revisionist holds, a less tendentious witness than the texts written to venerate the victims and damn Svyatopolk. An outside source that contradicts the official story deserves a hearing precisely because it is outside.

Taken together these strands yield the revisionist thesis: that the cult of Boris and Gleb may rest, at least in part, on a pious inversion — that Yaroslav, having had Boris killed by his Varangians, transferred the guilt to the defeated Svyatopolk and built a saint’s cult over the act. It is a striking case, and it has had a real presence in the historiography; it cannot be dismissed as mere sensationalism.

The Critics of the Revision

The revisionist case has been examined closely and, in the mainstream of the scholarship, found wanting as a replacement for the standard account — though not always dismissed as a possibility worth weighing. The criticisms are several.

First, on the saga’s reliability: the Eymundar þáttr survives only in Flateyjarbók, a compilation of around 1387, more than three and a half centuries after the events; it is a heroic þáttr, a genre that freely shapes, telescopes, and embellishes for narrative effect, not a chronicle aiming at record. Sagas of this kind are notorious for conflating distinct historical figures, garbling names, and importing folklore motifs (Lenhoff 1989; on saga historicity generally). A text of this character, the critics hold, cannot bear the evidentiary weight the revision places on it: it can attest that Varangians served Yaroslav and that the Rus’ wars were remembered in Scandinavia, but it cannot establish who killed Boris.

Second, on the identification of “Burizleif”: the equation Burizleif = Boris is far from secure. The name-form corresponds at least as plausibly — many would say more plausibly — to Bolesław (Boleslav), the name of Bolesław I of Poland, Svyatopolk’s father-in-law and military ally, who intervened in the Rus’ war on Svyatopolk’s side and against Yaroslav. On this reading the saga’s “Burizleif,” the foreign rival whom Yarisleif fights, is the Polish king, not Boris at all — and the killing of “Burizleif” is then either a confused echo of the Polish war or a saga embellishment without a fixed referent. Others take Burizleif to be a composite or conflated figure, fusing Bolesław, Svyatopolk, and possibly Boris into a single saga-rival (Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996, noting the Bolesław identification as the more natural one). If Burizleif is Bolesław or a composite, the revisionist’s central pillar — that the saga remembers the killing of Boris by Yaroslav’s men — falls.

Third, on the weight of the standard account: the unanimous testimony of three independent-enough Rus’ texts, anchored externally by Thietmar’s near-contemporary notice, is not lightly overturned by a single late saga. The critics insist on an asymmetry of evidence: the standard account is multiple, early (in its Chronicle and Thietmar layers), and mutually corroborating; the revision rests on one text, late, garbled, and of a genre ill-suited to historical reconstruction. To prefer the saga is to prefer the weaker witness for the sake of its very disagreement, which is a methodological temptation rather than a methodological warrant.

Where mainstream scholarship has come to rest is not on a triumphant vindication of the cult’s version but on a cautious retention of it. Franklin and Shepard, in their authoritative survey, treat Svyatopolk’s responsibility as the received and best-supported account while acknowledging that the saga raises a real question and that the sources are of the side that won; they do not endorse the Yaroslav thesis (Franklin and Shepard 1996). Gail Lenhoff, in the standard monograph on the cult and texts, examines the saga evidence and the Ilyin-style revision and concludes against treating the Eymundar þáttr as overturning the Rus’ tradition, while granting that the historical kernel is irrecoverable with certainty (Lenhoff 1989). The honest summary is that the field regards the question as, at minimum, not closed — and that the standard account remains the default not because the saga has been disproved but because it is too weak a reed to displace the convergent earlier evidence.

A further point cuts in more than one direction and is worth stating plainly. Even the revisionist case, at its boldest, touches mainly Boris: the saga’s killing of “Burizleif” maps, if it maps at all, onto Boris, not Gleb, whose death near Smolensk has no saga analogue. And the deeper one presses the suspicion that the winning side wrote the record, the more one must concede that the suspicion is structural and unfalsifiable from the sources we have — it can motivate doubt about the standard account, but it cannot by itself supply a positive alternative. Doubt about a victor’s narrative is not the same as evidence for a particular rival narrative, and the revision is on its firmest ground when it argues that the question is open and on its weakest when it asserts Yaroslav’s guilt as established.

The Dispute Crystallized

[Disputed: Who ordered the killings of Boris and Gleb in 1015?
Position A (the standard account; the received and majority view). Svyatopolk “the Accursed” ordered the killings of Boris, Gleb, and Svyatoslav to clear his path to Kiev. Sources/advocates: the unanimous Rus’ tradition — the Russian Primary Chronicle (s.a. 1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953), the anonymous Skazanie, and Nestor’s Chtenie (both in Hollingsworth 1992) — externally supported in its broad outline by the near-contemporary, independent notice of Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon; retained as the best-supported account by mainstream scholarship (Franklin and Shepard 1996; Lenhoff 1989; Fedotov 1946). This is the account on which the saints’ cult rests.
Position B (the saga-based revision; a minority view). Yaroslav the Wise — the war’s victor and the cult’s promoter — was responsible for the death of at least Boris, the guilt being later transferred to the defeated Svyatopolk. Source/advocates: the Old Norse Eymundar þáttr (Eymund’s Saga, in Flateyjarbók), in which Eymund’s Varangians, serving “King Yarisleif” (Yaroslav), kill the rival prince “Burizleif”; pressed most fully by the Russian historian N. N. Ilyin (mid-twentieth century), and entertained in various forms since.
The critics of Position B. The saga is late (preserved only in Flateyjarbók, c. 1387), garbled, and of a heroic genre unsuited to historical record; its “Burizleif” is more plausibly Bolesław I of Poland (Svyatopolk’s ally), or a composite of several rivals, than Boris; and a single late saga cannot overturn three convergent, earlier Rus’ texts anchored by Thietmar (Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996).
The state of the question. Mainstream scholarship retains Svyatopolk as the best-supported account while conceding that the surviving narrative is the victor’s and that the historical kernel cannot be recovered with certainty; the question is treated as open at the level of proof, not as settled in the revisionist’s favor. No verdict is asserted here beyond this.]

What Remains Secure

Beneath the dispute over agency lies a core that neither side contests: that Boris and Gleb died in 1015, in the violence of the succession struggle that followed Vladimir’s death; that they were dead before Yaroslav’s final victory in 1019; and that within a generation or two a cult had formed around them as innocent victims (see Dating and Embellishment). What is disputed is the assignment of the order to kill — and that dispute, as the scholarship leaves it, is between a well-attested but victor-shaped standard account and a strikingly independent but evidentially weak revision. The reader who wants certainty will not find it here; the reader who wants the honest shape of the evidence will find that the tradition’s Svyatopolk holds the field, contested but not displaced.

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The killings of Boris, Gleb, and Svyatoslav assigned to Svyatopolk, s.a. 1015; Svyatopolk as “the second Cain,” s.a. 1019.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie; Svyatopolk’s guilt as the engine of the narrative.)
Eymundar þáttr (Eymund’s Saga), preserved in Flateyjarbók (Icelandic compilation, c. 1387). (Eymund’s Varangians in the service of “King Yarisleif”/Yaroslav and the killing of the rival prince “Burizleif.”)
Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon (composed to 1018). (The near-contemporary, external notice of the Rus’ succession struggle and Svyatopolk’s part in it.)
Ilyin, N. N. (the mid-twentieth-century Russian historian who pressed the saga-based case implicating Yaroslav; cited as the principal advocate of the revision).
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The saga evidence weighed and the revision found insufficient to overturn the Rus’ tradition; the Burizleif = Bolesław/composite alternatives.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (Svyatopolk’s responsibility retained as best-supported; Thietmar’s notice; the victor-shaped character of the surviving narrative.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Svyatopolk’s guilt as constitutive of the passion-bearer framing.)