Daniel of Moscow

Origins

Daniel was born in 1261 at Vladimir, the fourth and youngest son of the great prince Alexander Nevsky and his second wife, remembered in the sources as Vassa (Bassa). He was but two years old when his father, returning worn out from his last embassy to the Horde, received the monastic schema and died at Gorodets in 1263; the boy was named for the desert father Daniel the Stylite, whose memory he would honour all his life. In the division of Alexander's inheritance the infant Daniel was allotted the principality of Moscow — at that time a minor and thinly peopled appanage on the Moskva, the least and last of the shares, a frontier town of little account among the older cities of Rostov, Suzdal, Vladimir, Tver and Pereslavl. For his childhood the little principality was governed by regents and by his uncle Yaroslav of Tver; from about 1272, and in his own right from his youth, Daniel took up the rule of Moscow, and he held it for some thirty years.

The peaceable prince

Daniel came to manhood in the cruellest period of the Tatar yoke, when the Russian princes, holding their thrones only by the yarlyk (patent) of the khan, tore one another and their people in the struggle for the grand-princely throne of Vladimir — and did not scruple to bring the Tatars themselves into Rus to ravage their rivals' lands. The bitterest of these quarrels was between Daniel's own elder brothers, the sons of Alexander Nevsky: Dmitry, prince of Pereslavl, and Andrei, prince of Gorodets, who thrice brought Tatar armies against his brother and against the Russian towns. Amid this fratricide Daniel stood almost alone as a peacemaker. Where he could, he reconciled the contending princes and held back the shedding of Christian blood; when in 1293 Andrei brought down the terrible raid of the Tatar general Dyuden (the "Dyuden host"), which sacked fourteen cities, Daniel defended Moscow and sheltered the fugitives, and afterward laboured again for peace between his brothers. The chronicles and his Life dwell on this gentleness as the mark of his sanctity: a prince who loved peace and used his power to spare rather than to destroy.

His restraint was proven even in victory. In 1300 the prince of Ryazan, Konstantin Romanovich, made alliance with the Tatars and moved against Moscow; Daniel met and defeated him, scattered the Tatar auxiliaries, and took Konstantin prisoner — yet, the sources are careful to record, he took no lands and no plunder from his beaten enemy, holding the captive prince in honour and seeking only peace. In an age when victory meant annexation and sack, this refusal to profit by the sword was remembered as a wonder of Christian rule.

The gathering of the lands

For all his gentleness — indeed, because of it — Moscow grew under Daniel. Two gains laid the foundation of its future greatness. About 1300 he added the town of Kolomna, at the strategic junction of the Moskva and the Oka, to his principality. And in 1302 his nephew Ivan Dmitrievich, prince of Pereslavl-Zalessky — whom Daniel had loved and protected — died childless, and by his will bequeathed his rich and populous principality to his uncle Daniel. Pereslavl was a far stronger and more honoured seat than Moscow; yet Daniel, when he came into it, would not move his capital there, but kept his seat at Moscow and joined Pereslavl to it. By this the small frontier appanage was doubled in strength and set on the road to pre-eminence. Historians reckon the peaceful acquisition of Pereslavl the turning-point from which the rise of Moscow dates; and the Church sees in Daniel's fidelity to his little city, and his refusal of the grasping ways of his age, the very cause of the blessing that followed.

Daniel was the founder of a dynasty as well as of a city. From him descended his son Ivan I "Kalita" and the whole house of Daniel — the Danilovichi — the line of the Grand Princes of Moscow and, after them, of the Tsars of all Russia, down to the end of the Rurikid dynasty. The gathering of the Russian lands about Moscow, which his descendants accomplished, had its beginning in the peaceable reign of its first prince.

Founder of the Danilov Monastery

Toward the year 1282 Daniel built on the right bank of the Moscow River, some way south of his town, a monastery — the first monastic house of Moscow — and dedicated its church to his own patron and namesake, Daniel the Stylite, the fifth-century pillar-saint of Constantinople. This Danilov Monastery (the Monastery of Saint Daniel) became the prince's own foundation and the place he chose for his rest. In its early years it was the seat of the first archimandrite of Moscow; later, under his grandson, the community was for a time removed within the Kremlin, and the old site declined — until in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the prince's own posthumous prompting (see below), it was restored. Today the Danilov Monastery, raised again after the Soviet years, is the administrative seat of the Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia — a living continuation of the first prince's foundation.

Repose

In 1303 Daniel fell gravely ill. Following the piety of his house — as his father Alexander Nevsky had done before him — he received the great schema, the highest degree of the monastic life, and so died a monk. In his humility he asked to be buried not within the church, among the honoured dead, but in the common cemetery of the brethren of his own Danilov Monastery, that he might lie among the poor monks as one of them. He reposed on March 4, 1303, aged about forty-two, and was buried as he had asked.

Relics and glorification

The monastery Daniel had founded fell in time into neglect, and the memory of his grave grew dim. But the prince did not leave his own resting-place unguarded. Under Ivan IV ("the Terrible") in the sixteenth century, and before, the tradition records signs and reproofs at the forgotten tomb — a youth of the tsar's retinue healed, a careless noble rebuked by an apparition of the prince — until the tsars took heed, restored the Danilov Monastery, and appointed that his memory be kept. At length, in the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, on August 30, 1652, his grave was opened and his relics were found incorrupt; they were taken up with honour and enshrined in the monastery's church of the Holy Fathers of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, and Daniel was numbered among the saints. He is thus commemorated twice: on March 4, the day of his repose, and on August 30, the uncovering of his relics — a day he shares, in the Russian calendar, with the translation of the relics of his father Alexander Nevsky to Saint Petersburg (1724).

Veneration and later cultus

Daniel is honoured as one of the heavenly protectors of Moscow and the founder of its greatness — the peaceable prince from whom the city and the whole gathering of Russia around it took their beginning. His cultus, centred on the Danilov Monastery, revived with the monastery's own restorations, and his memory was invoked in the Russian capital as that of a founder-saint. In modern times, after the return of the Danilov Monastery to the Church in 1983 and its restoration as the seat of the Moscow Patriarchate, the veneration of its founder-prince was renewed; a portion of his relics, dispersed and lost in the Soviet upheavals, is still sought and honoured.