Alexander Nevsky

Origins and early life

Alexander was born on 30 May 1220 at Pereslavl-Zalessky, the second son of Prince Yaroslav II Vsevolodovich (in baptism Theodore, †1246) and his wife Theodosia, a Ryazan princess. His grandfather was Vsevolod the Big Nest, and through him Alexander belonged to the senior line of the descendants of Vladimir Monomakh. His elder brother, the boy-prince Theodore (†1233, commemorated June 5), died at fifteen on the eve of his wedding; the intended bride, a daughter of Michael of Chernigov, became instead the nun Euphrosyne of Suzdal (September 25). As a child Alexander received the "princely tonsure" — a rite of initiation to knighthood — in the Transfiguration Cathedral of Pereslavl at the hands of Bishop Simon of Suzdal, one of the compilers of the Kiev Caves Paterikon, who blessed him for military service in defence of the Russian Church and land.

From 1236 Alexander ruled as prince of Novgorod the Great, the wealthy northern republic guarding Russia's exposed western frontier. In 1239 he married the daughter of Prince Briacheslav of Polotsk (in baptism Alexandra), receiving from his father at the betrothal the wonderworking Theodore Icon of the Mother of God, before which he prayed thereafter throughout his life.

The Battle of the Neva (1240)

In 1240, while the Mongol invasion under Batu Khan was still ravaging the southern and central Russian principalities, a Swedish force under the command of the king's son-in-law — the sources name a "Birger" — sailed into the Neva to seize the Novgorodian lands and, the chroniclers say, to impose the Latin faith. Their envoy is remembered as sending Alexander the taunt: "Resist me if you can; I am already here, taking your land captive." The prince, not yet twenty, prayed long in the church of Holy Wisdom at Novgorod, received the blessing of Archbishop Spyridon, and went out against the enemy with a small force, exhorting his men with the words that became his motto: "God is not in strength but in truth." A warrior of his named Pelgui (in baptism Philip), keeping watch, is said to have seen at dawn a vision of the Holy Passion-Bearers Boris and Gleb standing in a boat, coming "to help their kinsman Alexander." On 15 July 1240 Alexander fell upon the Swedish camp and routed it, himself wounding the enemy commander in the face with his spear. From this victory on the Neva the people surnamed him Nevsky.

The Battle of the Ice (1242)

The victory did not remove the greater danger from the west. The crusading orders of the Baltic — the Teutonic Knights and the Sword-Brothers — pressed on the Russian marches, and in 1240–1242 they took the fortress of Koporye, then Pskov itself, boasting they would "subdue the whole Slavic people." (Novgorod, having quarrelled with its prince, had for a time driven Alexander out, only to recall him in haste.) In a swift winter campaign Alexander retook Koporye and liberated Pskov, and in the spring of 1242 he met the main force of the Order in a decisive battle on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus. Raising his hands to heaven, he prayed: "Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an overweening people; help me, O Lord, as of old Thou didst help Moses against Amalek and my forefather Yaroslav against the accursed Svyatopolk." On 5 April 1242 the two armies clashed on the ice; the heavily armoured knights were broken and put to flight, cut down as they fled, and a multitude was led away captive. The Battle of the Ice secured Russia's western border and made Alexander's name famous, the chronicler says, "from the Egyptian Sea to Mount Ararat, and from the Varangian Sea to great Rome."

Diplomacy with the Horde

With the west made safe, the harder task remained: to preserve Russia under the Mongol yoke without provoking its destruction. From 1242 Alexander and his father travelled to the Horde; Metropolitan Cyril blessed the mission, which — in a phrase of the sources — demanded "the meekness of an angel and the wisdom of a serpent," to turn the Tatars from plunderers into tolerable overlords. Yaroslav was summoned onward to distant Mongolia and there poisoned, dying ten days after his kinsman Michael of Chernigov, who was martyred in the Horde for refusing its rites. Alexander inherited both his father's rank and his father's policy of alliance with the Golden Horde. He formed a friendship with Sartak, the son of Batu, who had accepted Christianity; and where other princes — Daniel of Galicia, his own brother Andrew, even Michael of Chernigov — sought Western help and papal alliance against the Mongols, Alexander, remembering the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204, refused to trust the Latin West. When envoys of Pope Innocent IV came in 1248 offering aid in exchange for submission to Rome, he answered that the Russians held fast to the faith of the Seven Ecumenical Councils: "this we know well, but your teaching we do not accept."

When in 1252 a rising against the Tatars, led by his brother Andrew, threatened a new devastation, Alexander journeyed again to the Horde to avert a punitive campaign; Andrew fled to Sweden, and Alexander became Great Prince of all Rus — of Vladimir, Kiev and Novgorod. In the years that followed he beat back a fresh German assault on Pskov (1253), made peace with Norway (1254), and led a campaign into Finland "through the polar night" (1256), bringing the Gospel into pagan lands. In 1261, through his efforts and those of Metropolitan Cyril, an Orthodox diocese of Sarai was established in the very capital of the Horde. In 1262, when many cities rose against the Tatar tribute-collectors and reprisal threatened, Alexander went a fourth and last time to the Horde and, by his intercession, turned away the danger; the khan Berke ceased sending tribute onward to Mongolia and made the Golden Horde in effect a shield for Russia against the east.

Repose

On the return journey from this last embassy Alexander fell gravely ill. Unable to reach Vladimir, he stopped at the Theophany (Fyodorovsky) Monastery at Gorodets on the Volga, where he received the great monastic schema with the name Alexis and gave up his spirit to God on 14 November 1263. When the news reached Vladimir, Metropolitan Cyril proclaimed in the funeral oration: "My children, know that the sun of the land of Suzdal has set — there will be no other prince like him." His body was borne nine days to Vladimir and remained incorrupt. On 23 November 1263, as he was about to be buried in the church of the Nativity Monastery, a wonder was seen: when the steward Sebastian and the Metropolitan wished to place in his hand the scroll of absolution, the dead prince stretched out his hand of himself and took it, then folded it again — a marvel that filled the beholders with awe.

Relics and translations

Alexander's relics rested at the Nativity Monastery in Vladimir, where his cultus grew and miracles were recorded, especially before national trials; tradition holds that he appeared on the eve of the Battle of Kulikovo (1380), at which point his relics were first uncovered. He was numbered among the saints at the Moscow council of 1547 under Metropolitan Macarius, and the canon to him was composed then by the monk Michael of Vladimir. In 1723–1724 the emperor Peter the Great, who had made the Neva the site of his new capital and taken Alexander as its heavenly patron, translated the relics with great solemnity to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Saint Petersburg; the translation is commemorated on August 30, the anniversary of the peace of Nystadt with Sweden. Peter decreed that the saint thereafter be depicted not as a monk but in princely and martial robes. The relics survived Soviet confiscation and museum captivity and were returned to the Lavra in 1989.

Veneration and later cultus

Alexander Nevsky became, and remains, the archetype of the holy warrior-prince of Russia, invoked as a defender of the fatherland and of Orthodoxy. Churches and monasteries without number bear his name; the Imperial Order of Saint Alexander Nevsky (1725) and later Soviet and Russian military decorations carried it into modern times, and Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film fixed the Battle of the Ice in the national imagination. The Church honours him above all for holding Rus to the Orthodox confession at the price of a lifetime of humiliating journeys to the Horde — a sanctity of self-sacrificing statesmanship rather than of the cloister, though he ended his life a monk.