The Conflict at His Death

The strife that broke out at Vladimir’s death on 15 July 1015 and the war of succession it unleashed. This file treats Vladimir’s death at his country residence of Berestovo; the secret kept by Svyatopolk’s faction while he seized Kyiv; the murders of Boris, Gleb, and Svyatoslav; the contested parentage of Svyatopolk “the Accursed,” whom the Chronicle calls the “son of two fathers”; and the long war that ended with the victory of Yaroslav the Wise at the battle of the Alta in 1019 and the founding of the great reign under which Rus’ Christianity flowered.

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

The Death at Berestovo

Vladimir died on 15 July 1015 at Berestovo, his country residence near Kyiv — the same Berestovo the Chronicle had named as a seat of his pagan concubines, now the place of his Christian death (see The Pagan Prince). He had reigned as a Christian for some twenty-seven years since his baptism, and as Grand Prince of Kyiv for thirty-five. The date of his death would become his feast day (see The New Constantine). But his death, far from being the peaceful close of a saint’s life, opened one of the bloodiest succession struggles in the history of the dynasty.

The Chronicle records that Vladimir’s death was at first kept secret, “for Svyatopolk was in Kiev” and his faction wished to control the succession before the news spread (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015). The body was lowered from the palace by ropes, wrapped, and carried to the Church of the Tithes — the cathedral Vladimir himself had built — and laid in a marble sarcophagus (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; see Building the Church). The secrecy was the first move in a war.

Svyatopolk the Accursed

The figure who seized the initiative was Svyatopolk, the eldest of the contenders in Kyiv. The Chronicle had marked him from birth as a son of ill omen: he was, it says, the child of the Greek woman, the former nun and widow of Vladimir’s brother Yaropolk, whom Vladimir had taken already pregnant when he killed Yaropolk in 980 — so that Svyatopolk was reckoned the son “of two fathers,” Yaropolk by blood and Vladimir by law (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 980; see The Pagan Prince). The detail is freighted with the chronicler’s purpose: the man who would murder his brothers is given a tainted, fratricidal origin from the start. [Disputed: The Chronicle’s account of Svyatopolk’s parentage — that he was the son of Yaropolk’s widow, taken pregnant by Vladimir, and thus “son of two fathers” — is part of the deliberately black hagiographic portrait of Svyatopolk built up by the cult of Boris and Gleb and the chroniclers of the victorious Yaroslav; the historical reliability of the “two fathers” detail cannot be confirmed, and it serves a clear narrative function.]

Seizing Kyiv on his father’s death, Svyatopolk moved to eliminate his rivals, and had Boris, Gleb, and Svyatoslav killed — the murders for which he earned the name Okayanny, “the Accursed,” and which made his victims the first saints of Rus’ (see Boris and Gleb). It must be remembered that the portrait of Svyatopolk as an unrelieved villain is the portrait drawn by his enemies and by the hagiographers of the brothers he killed; the collection reports it as such, the victors’ and the saints’ account of the loser, not a neutral record.

The War of the Sons

Vladimir had left many sons by his several wives — the Chronicle’s list under 988 names twelve, set by their father over the cities of the realm (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988) — and his death set them against one another. The decisive challenge to Svyatopolk came from Yaroslav, then ruling Novgorod in the north (the son later known as Yaroslav the Wise). Hearing of his brothers’ murders, Yaroslav gathered a force of Novgorodians and Varangians and marched south against Svyatopolk. The war ran for years and turned more than once; Svyatopolk drew Pecheneg and Polish support (his father-in-law was Bolesław of Poland), and Kyiv changed hands. But the struggle ended in Yaroslav’s favor at the battle of the Alta in 1019 — fought, with grim fittingness, near the river where Boris had been murdered — after which Svyatopolk fled westward and perished, an outcast, in the borderlands. The hagiographic tradition made his miserable end the judgment of God on a fratricide, a second Cain.

The Reign of Yaroslav

With Svyatopolk’s defeat, Yaroslav the Wise became, after a further period of division with his brother Mstislav, the sole ruler of Kyivan Rus’, reigning until 1054. His was the great reign of Kievan Christianity: it was Yaroslav who built the Cathedral of St. Sophia at Kyiv (1037), promoted the translation of books and the growth of native learning, issued the Russkaya Pravda law-code, secured the canonization and the shrine of Boris and Gleb at Vyshgorod, and saw the metropolitanate of Kyiv pass to its first native-born holder, Hilarion — the author of the Sermon on Law and Grace that gave Vladimir his earliest praise (see The Church of Rus and The New Constantine). The Christian Rus’ that Vladimir founded came to its first flowering under his son. The bloodshed at Vladimir’s death was real and terrible — three sons murdered, years of civil war — but it issued, through Yaroslav, in the consolidation of exactly the Christian civilization Vladimir’s baptism had begun.

The Shadow Over the Founding

The Problem of Succession

The bloodshed of 1015 was not merely a personal tragedy of one wicked brother; it exposed a structural flaw that would plague the Rurikid dynasty for centuries. Vladimir, like the steppe and Scandinavian dynasties from which his house descended, had no settled law of single succession — no rule of primogeniture by which the throne passed cleanly to the eldest son. Instead the realm was treated as the common patrimony of the ruling house, parceled among the sons as principalities, with the senior city of Kyiv falling to whichever prince could seize and hold it. The system, later formalized as a rota or “ladder” of succession among the princes, made every generational transition a potential civil war: the death of a grand prince left the throne open to contest among brothers, cousins, and nephews. Vladimir himself had won Kyiv exactly this way, by killing his brother Yaropolk (see The Pagan Prince); Svyatopolk now tried to win it the same way, by killing his brothers; and Yaroslav won it in the end by defeating Svyatopolk. The conversion of Rus’ did nothing to reform this politics of fratricide — the Church could canonize its victims, but it could not, for centuries, give the dynasty a peaceful rule of succession. The strife of 1015 is thus not an aberration but the first and bloodiest instance of a recurring pattern, and the cult of Boris and Gleb, the princes who refused to play the game, was in part the Church’s standing rebuke to it (see Boris and Gleb).

The Dark Frame

The strife of 1015 casts a long shadow over the story of St. Vladimir, and the collection does not soften it. The prince who brought Christianity to the Rus’ left a succession so unsettled that his death loosed fratricide and years of war; the dynasty he founded was, in its first generation as in its rise, marked by the blood of brothers. Yet the tradition has read even this in a redemptive key. Out of the bloodshed came the first saints of Rus’, the passion-bearers Boris and Gleb, whose refusal of fratricidal violence answered the very sin that had founded and now threatened the dynasty; and out of the war came the reign of Yaroslav, under which Vladimir’s Christian Rus’ was secured. The conflict at his death is the dark frame around the founding — a reminder that the conversion of a people did not abolish the violence of the age, and that the holiness which grew from Vladimir’s work grew, in its first and clearest form, precisely as the refusal of that violence.

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 (Svyatopolk’s parentage, “son of two fathers”), 988 (the twelve sons and their cities), and 1015 (Vladimir’s death at Berestovo, the secrecy, the burial in the Church of the Tithes, the murders, the war with Yaroslav).
The Tale of Boris and Gleb (Skazanie) and Nestor, Chtenie. Trans. in Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, 1974. On Svyatopolk the Accursed and his end.
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the succession war of 1015–1019 and the reign of Yaroslav the Wise.
“Yaroslav the Wise” and “Sviatopolk I of Kiev.” Encyclopedia of Ukraine (encyclopediaofukraine.com). For the battle of the Alta (1019) and the outcome of the war.