Boris and Gleb

Vladimir’s sons Boris and Gleb (in baptism Roman and David), murdered in 1015 by their half-brother Svyatopolk “the Accursed” in the struggle for the succession — and the first canonized native saints of Rus’. This file treats the two brothers who, the sources say, refused to lift a hand against an elder brother and went willingly to death rather than answer fratricide with fratricide; the distinctive Slavic category of the passion-bearer (strastoterpets) their cult created; their canonization and the translation of their relics to Vyshgorod; and the three early sources — the Primary Chronicle, the anonymous Skazanie, and Nestor’s Chtenie — through which their story comes down.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles)

The First Saints of the Rus’

It is one of the deep ironies of Vladimir’s story that the first native saints of the Church he founded were not himself, who baptized the nation, but two of his sons, killed in the dynastic bloodshed that his own death unleashed. Boris and Gleb — younger sons of Vladimir, by the Chronicle’s account the children of his “Bulgarian woman” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 980; see The Pagan Prince) — were murdered in 1015 in the war of succession, and within two generations were canonized as the first saints of native Rus’ birth. Their cult was firmly established a full century or more before their father’s, and it gave the Rus’ Church a distinctive form of holiness all its own. The collection treats them here both as Vladimir’s sons and as the saints whose veneration preceded and, in a sense, prepared his.

The Murders of 1015

When Vladimir died at Berestovo on 15 July 1015 (see The Conflict at His Death), the eldest surviving and most ruthless of his sons, Svyatopolk, seized Kyiv and moved to destroy his rivals. The sources agree on the essential narrative. Boris (whose baptismal name was Roman), who held Rostov, was returning from a campaign against the Pechenegs when news reached him of his father’s death and Svyatopolk’s seizure of the throne. His retinue urged him to march on Kyiv and take the throne by force; Boris refused, unwilling to lift his hand against an elder brother. Svyatopolk’s agents fell upon him in his tent on the bank of the Alta river and killed him. Gleb (baptismal name David), who held Murom, was lured toward Kyiv by a false message; near Smolensk, Svyatopolk’s men overtook him, and he was murdered — his throat cut, the sources say, by his own cook, Torchin. A third brother, Svyatoslav, was also killed in the slaughter. Svyatopolk earned, in the tradition, the name Okayanny — “the Accursed.”

The collection reports this as the common account of the three early sources, pinned to them per methodology §3.5; the sources differ in detail, and the relentlessly black portrait of Svyatopolk is the work of the hagiographers and of the victorious Yaroslav’s chroniclers (see The Conflict at His Death).

Passion-Bearers, Not Martyrs

What made Boris and Gleb saints was not how they died but how they chose to die. They were not killed for the faith; they were killed for the throne, in a wholly political murder. Their sanctity lies in their voluntary non-resistance — their refusal, in imitation of Christ, to answer violence with violence or fratricide with fratricide. Boris, the sources say, knowing that death was coming, would not raise his druzhina against his brother; he prayed, and gave himself up. Gleb likewise went to his death weeping but unresisting. They chose to suffer rather than to shed a brother’s blood, and in that choice the tradition saw a participation in the Passion of Christ.

This created a new and distinctively Slavic category of saint: the passion-bearer (strastoterpets) — one who is not a martyr for the faith in the strict sense, but who accepts unjust death in a Christ-like spirit of non-resistance and forgiveness. Boris and Gleb are the archetypes of this category in the Rus’ Church, and it remained a characteristic form of Russian and Ukrainian sanctity ever after, invoked again, nearly a millennium later, for the imperial passion-bearers of 1918. The veneration of Boris and Gleb taught the newly Christian Rus’ that holiness could lie precisely in the refusal of power and violence — a remarkable lesson for a warrior society, and one rooted in the deepest meaning of the Gospel the brothers’ father had brought to the land.

Canonization, Relics, and Feast

Boris and Gleb were canonized within Kievan Rus’ in the later eleventh century — the glorification is conventionally dated to 1071/1072 — making them the first formally canonized saints of native Rus’ birth. Their cult centered on Vyshgorod, near Kyiv, where Yaroslav the Wise, having defeated Svyatopolk and avenged his brothers, built a church to receive their relics; the translation of the relics to the new church at Vyshgorod in 1072 (with a further translation in 1115) was the great public act of their veneration. Their feast is kept on 24 July (with 2 May for the translation of the relics). The brothers became patrons of the Rus’ land and of its princes, invoked especially against fratricidal strife — a poignant patronage, given the manner of their deaths.

The Three Sources

The story of Boris and Gleb comes down through three early texts, which together make up the earliest substantial corpus of East Slavic hagiography:

The Primary Chronicle, under the year 1015, gives the annalistic account within the larger narrative of the succession war.
The anonymous Skazanie (the Tale of Boris and Gleb, sometimes the Lay) is the fullest and most influential hagiographic treatment, rich in the brothers’ prayers and laments and in the theology of their non-resistance.
Nestor’s Chtenie (the Reading on the Life and Murder of the Blessed Passion-Bearers Boris and Gleb) — by the monk Nestor of the Caves, to whom the Primary Chronicle was also long ascribed — gives a more formally hagiographic life.

These texts differ in detail and emphasis, and their relative dating and interdependence are a long-standing scholarly question (see The Sources). The collection draws on their common account and notes that the precise sequence and the more elaborate speeches belong to the hagiographic art rather than to documented record.

The Sons Who Crowned the Dynasty

The Theology of Non-Resistance

The cult of Boris and Gleb posed, and answered, a hard theological question for a warrior society freshly converted: could it be holy to not fight? The brothers were princes, men with retinues and the means to resist; the ordinary code of their world, and of their dynasty, demanded that they meet a usurper’s force with force. Their refusal to do so was not weakness or fatalism but a deliberate imitation of Christ, who “when he was reviled, reviled not again” and went unresisting to his death. The Skazanie puts into Boris’s mouth the reasoning explicitly: he will not raise his hand against an elder brother, for to do so would be to repeat Cain’s sin, and he chooses rather to suffer as Christ suffered. This is the theological core of the passion-bearer: a sanctity that consists precisely in the renunciation of the violence that the world, and even justice, might seem to permit. For the Rus’, barely a generation Christian, it was a startling and demanding lesson — that the Gospel might require a prince to die rather than to kill, even in a just cause, even against a murderer. The lesson did not abolish the fratricidal politics of the dynasty (see The Conflict at His Death), but it set against that politics a permanent, venerated rebuke, and it planted in East Slavic Christianity a strain of non-resistant, suffering holiness that would recur through the centuries.

The First Fruit of the Church

That the first saints of Rus’ were Vladimir’s own murdered sons gave the Christian dynasty a sacred foundation of a peculiar kind. The house that Vladimir had won by fratricide — for he had himself killed his brother Yaropolk to take the throne (see The Pagan Prince) — now produced, in the next generation, two princes who chose death rather than fratricide, and whom the Church raised to its altars for that choice. The pattern is almost too neat, and the hagiographers surely felt its force: the sin at the root of the dynasty answered, in the sons, by a sanctity that refused exactly that sin. Boris and Gleb stand at the head of the long line of Rus’ saints that Vladimir’s baptism made possible, and their cult — older, firmer, and for centuries more vivid than their father’s — was the first fruit of the Church he founded. When Vladimir himself came at last to be venerated, it was as the father of these passion-bearers and the baptizer of their people (see The New Constantine).

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Entries s.a. 980 (Boris and Gleb as sons of the “Bulgarian woman”) and 1015 (the murders by Svyatopolk; Boris at the Alta; Gleb near Smolensk).
The Tale of Boris and Gleb (Skazanie o Borise i Glebe), anonymous, 11th c., and Nestor, Reading on the Life and Murder of Boris and Gleb (Chtenie), 11th c. Trans. in Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky, New York: Dutton, 1974. The earliest hagiography of the passion-bearers.
“Boris and Gleb.” Encyclopedia of Ukraine (encyclopediaofukraine.com); and the OCA Lives of the Saints (oca.org), for the baptismal names (Roman, David), the glorification (1071/1072), the translation of relics to Vyshgorod (1072), and the feast (24 July; 2 May).
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. On the passion-bearer (strastoterpets) as a distinctive category of Rus’ sanctity.