Andrew Bogoliubsky

The son of Dolgoruky

Andrew was born about 1111, the son of Yuri Dolgoruky, prince of Rostov-Suzdal, by a Polovtsian (Cuman) princess, daughter of Khan Aepa — and so, on his father's side, a grandson of Vladimir Monomakh. He was brought up in the north-eastern forests, in the young towns of the Zalesye which his father was founding: Moscow (first named in 1147), Yuriev-Polsky (1152), Dmitrov (1154).

The chroniclers agree on two things about him from the start: he was a formidable soldier, and he was devout to a degree that struck his contemporaries. He rose for the night office and went to the churches before matins with his own candles; he gave freely to the poor and to the clergy; and he preferred the north to the endless dynastic campaigning in the south. The by-name Bogoliubsky — "the God-loving" — is drawn from his residence at Bogolyubovo, but the chroniclers plainly heard it as a description. In the fighting near Lutsk in 1150 he was nearly killed and attributed his escape to the prayers of the Great Martyr Theodore Stratelates, on whose feast it happened.

The icon that would not go further

In 1155, tired of his father's southern wars, Andrew left his appanage at Vyshgorod near Kiev and went north — without Yuri's leave, and taking with him the wonderworking icon of the Mother of God that had come from Constantinople and was kept in the convent there. Ten versts short of Vladimir, at the meadow above the Klyazma, the horses drawing the icon stopped and could not be made to go on. Andrew kept vigil there through the night, and the Theotokos appeared to him, holding a scroll, and bade him leave the icon at Vladimir and not carry it to Rostov as he had intended, and build a church on the place of the vision.

Out of that night came three things: the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, henceforth the palladium of the Russian land and one of the most venerated images in Orthodoxy; the Bogolyubskaya icon, which Andrew commissioned to depict the Mother of God exactly as she had stood before him with the scroll; and the town and monastery of Bogolyubovo (from 1158), with the prince's stone palace beside the church — the only surviving fragment of civil architecture of pre-Mongol Rus, and the place where he would be killed.

The building of Vladimir

On his father's death in 1157 Andrew became prince of Rostov, Suzdal and Vladimir, and made Vladimir — a town of no great antiquity, without a boyar aristocracy to bargain with — his capital, in deliberate preference to the old cities. He then built on a scale nobody in Rus had attempted since Yaroslav.

The cathedral of the Dormition at Vladimir (1158–1160) was raised to house the Vladimir Icon and endowed with a tithe of the principality's revenues; it became the metropolitan church of north-eastern Rus and, in the following centuries, the model on which the Dormition cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin was built. He raised the Golden Gate of Vladimir (1164), and, in 1165, in memory of his son Izyaslav, the church of the Intercession on the Nerl — a small white church standing alone in a water-meadow, generally reckoned the most beautiful building in Russia. The chronicles credit him with about thirty churches in all.

The two feasts, and the quarrel over the metropolitanate

Andrew's church policy was of a piece with his politics: he wanted the north to be ecclesiastically as well as politically independent of Kiev, and he petitioned the patriarch of Constantinople, Luke Chrysoberges, for a separate metropolitan see at Vladimir. The patriarch refused; the most Andrew obtained was the honour of the white klobuk for his bishop, Theodore, as a mark of dignity. The affair ended badly — Theodore ("Feodorets") quarrelled with the metropolitan of Kiev, was condemned and put to death there in 1169 — and the chroniclers are divided on how much of the blame is Andrew's.

Two feasts, however, are securely his gift to the Russian calendar:

• The Protection of the Mother of God (Pokrov), October 1 — the commemoration of the vision of Andrew the Fool-for-Christ at Blachernae, which the Greeks had never made a feast. Andrew Bogoliubsky established it in his lands, and it became, and remains, one of the best-loved feasts of the Russian Church.
• The Procession of the Precious Cross and the All-Merciful Saviour, August 1 — instituted after his victory over the Volga Bulgars in 1164, when the Cross and the Vladimir Icon were carried before the army; the same day was said to have brought the emperor Manuel Comnenus a victory over the Saracens, and the two rulers agreed to keep the feast together.

The sack of Kiev

The record is not all light. In 1169 Andrew sent an army south under his son Mstislav which took Kiev by storm and sacked it for three days, burning churches and the Caves monastery and carrying off their treasures and icons — the first time the mother-city of Rus had been plundered by Rus. Andrew did not go himself, and did not take the Kievan throne, sending a brother to hold it and remaining at Vladimir: the point of the campaign was precisely that Kiev no longer mattered. The chroniclers of the south never forgave him, and the event is inseparable from the judgement of his reign. It is recorded here because a hagiography that suppressed it would not be worth reading; the Church glorified him for the manner of his death, not for the conduct of his wars.

The murder at Bogolyubovo

Andrew ruled his boyars hard, and in the summer of 1174 a conspiracy formed against him in his own household: the Kuchkovichi — the kin of Stephen Kuchka, whose lands had become Moscow and whose daughter had been Andrew's wife — together with his steward, his keeper of the keys, and about twenty others.

On the night of 29–30 June they broke into the prince's chamber in the palace at Bogolyubovo, having first stolen away his sword — the sword of Saint Boris, which hung at his bed. Andrew, an old man of sixty-three, fought them off bare-handed in the dark and was struck down with many wounds. Believing him dead, the murderers went to drink; but he had recovered and crawled down the staircase turret, and they traced him by the blood and killed him at the foot of the stair. He died, the chronicler says, praying and forgiving: Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit. The parallel with Boris and Gleb, the first Russian passion-bearers, was drawn at once, and it is the reason for his classification.

His body was thrown out and lay unburied while Bogolyubovo was plundered. A servant of his, Kuzma of Kiev, recovered it, wrapped it and got it into the church porch. Only after two days was it taken into the church of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Bogolyubovo, and on the sixth day it was carried in procession to Vladimir and laid in the Dormition cathedral. That burial is the commemoration of July 4.

Relics and veneration

Local veneration began early — the Tale of the Murder of Andrew Bogoliubsky, written in Vladimir within a generation, is already a martyr's passion in form and calls him "the second Boris." His relics were uncovered incorrupt in 1702 in the Dormition cathedral at Vladimir, and general church veneration follows from that date; they rest there still. He is commemorated also in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir. The Bogolyubskaya icon, made at his order, is itself one of the great wonderworking images of Russia.