Peter, Tsarevich of the Horde
Our Venerable Father Peter, Prince of the Horde, Wonderworker of Rostov
Venerable · Prince · Wonderworker · d. 1290, at Rostov
Commemorated 23 May — Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, 30 June — Repose at Rostov, 1290, in the monastery of the Apostles Peter and Paul which he founded
Peter of Rostov was a prince of the Golden Horde, nephew of Berke Khan (Bergai), who came to Christ through the preaching of Bishop Cyril of Rostov in the years when the Russian principalities lay under Tatar tribute, left the Horde for Rostov, was baptised there, and lived out a long life on the shore of Lake Nero as a landholder, a husband and father, and at the last a monk. The account of his conversion turns on two events: the healing of Berke's son at Bishop Cyril's prayers, and a vision of the Apostles Peter and Paul, who directed him to buy land beside the lake and build a church in their name — the monastery that bore his name for six centuries afterwards. He reposed in 1290, having received the monastic tonsure shortly before, and is a rare and pointed figure in the Russian calendar: a saint drawn out of the conquering horde itself, and venerated by the conquered.
The bishop in the Horde
The story begins in 1253, when Cyril, Bishop of Rostov, travelled to the Horde on the business of his see. Such journeys were routine and humiliating — Russian bishops and princes went to Sarai to petition, to pay, and to receive the yarlyk that confirmed them in their offices. Cyril, questioned by the khan, spoke not of tribute but of his city and its saints, and above all of the wonders worked at the relics of Leontius of Rostov, the first enlightener of that country. Among those who listened was a boy of the khan's own family, a nephew of Berke — in the Russian sources Bergai — the khan who had himself become a Muslim and whose court was the political centre of the western Mongol world. The account says simply that the boy's heart was moved and that he did not forget what he had heard.
Not long afterwards Berke's own son fell gravely ill, and no physician of the Horde could help him. Someone remembered the Russian bishop and the cures he had described, and Cyril was summoned back. He prayed over the boy, and the boy recovered; the khan loaded him with gifts and sent him home. The nephew, who had now seen with his eyes what he had heard with his ears, followed the bishop's caravan secretly and overtook it, asking to be taken to Rostov.
Baptism and the vision at Lake Nero
At Rostov he was not baptised at once. The hagiographic tradition is careful on this point — a Tatar prince fleeing the Horde was a diplomatic hazard, and the bishop delayed until he was satisfied of the young man's mind. When he was baptised he received the name Peter. He then did what few converts of his rank did: he stayed, and lived an ordinary life. The sources describe him at his prayers and in silence, and equally as a man who hunted and fished on the lake and kept the company of the princes of Rostov, who treated him as an equal and in time gave him a wife from among the Horde nobility settled in the city.
The founding of his monastery is told as a vision. The Apostles Peter and Paul appeared to him — he had been baptised with the name of the first of them, and the Rostov cathedral kept their memory — and gave him bags of gold and silver, bidding him buy from the prince the land on the shore of Lake Nero where he had seen them, and raise there a church in their name. He went to Prince Boris of Rostov with the money; the prince, hearing the vision, sold him the ground, and the bishop set the boundary; and Peter built the church and, beside it, the monastery of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, which stood outside the walls of Rostov and was known for centuries as the Petrovsky monastery, "the Tsarevich's."
Marriage, family and repose
Peter married and had children, and his descendants — the Rostov families that traced themselves to him — kept the memory and the patronage of his foundation; the charters of the monastery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries repeatedly invoke him as its founder and his heirs as its protectors. This is an unusual shape for a Russian monastic saint: he was not a hermit, he did not flee the world, and his sanctity was worked out inside a household and a lawsuit-ridden landholding.
After his wife's death, and shortly before his own, he received the monastic tonsure in the monastery he had built, and there he reposed in 1290, an old man. He was buried in his own church of the Apostles.
Veneration
Local veneration at Rostov is attested from the fourteenth century, and the monastery preserved the Tale of Peter, Tsarevich of the Horde — a narrative that is as much a charter of the house's lands as a life of its founder, and whose legal sections (the purchase of the ground, the disputes with the princes of Rostov over its boundaries) are the reason historians treat it as resting on documents. General celebration throughout the Russian Church was established at the Council of 1547, among the canonisations of Metropolitan Macarius which gathered the local saints of the Russian lands into a single calendar. His relics remained at the Petrovsky monastery until its suppression; he is numbered also among the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl (May 23).
Feast and commemoration
June 30 (church date; New Calendar civil June 30; Old Calendar civil July 13), a Russian commemoration, kept in the Moscow Patriarchate, the Orthodox Church in America, and the Russian diaspora, and not found in the Greek or Antiochian books. The placement is not accidental: the saint's own patrons are the Apostles Peter and Paul, whose feast falls on June 29, and his day is the morrow of theirs — which is also the Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles, so that the monastery-founder of the Apostles' church is commemorated within the apostolic octave. He is commemorated again with the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl on May 23.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O father, was preserved undistorted that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to overlook the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Peter, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Peter is painted as an aged monk in the mantia and schema, white-bearded, with a scroll — the standard type of a venerable founder — but with two marks of his own: the model of his church of the Apostles Peter and Paul held in his hands in the founder-icons, and, in the more elaborate seventeenth-century Rostov compositions, the princely dress of the Horde shown beneath or beside the monastic habit, or the scene of the apostles appearing to him with the bags of silver. Hagiographic border-scenes (kleima) around a central figure narrate the bishop's preaching at Sarai, the healing of the khan's son, the flight to Rostov, the baptism, the vision, the purchase of the land and the building of the church. He is shown also in the crowded Sobor of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl. No pre-1900 image of him has been located in the openly licensed corpus; the Menologion of Basil II is of no use here, being both four centuries too early and confined to September–February.
Disputed questions
The Tale survives in redactions of the fifteenth century and later, and its details — the boy's presence at Cyril's audience, the dialogue with the princes, the vision — are hagiographic in form. What underlies them is not in serious doubt: a Tatar of the khan's family did settle at Rostov, was baptised, founded the Petrovsky monastery, and left descendants whose claims to its lands the Tale defends. Whether Berke (†1266) is exactly the khan of the narrative, and whether the healed son and the converted nephew belong to one visit or to two, the sources do not allow us to say. The date 1290 for the repose is the tradition's, and is consistent with a man converted as a youth about 1253.