Novgorod Republic

The Novgorod Republic was a medieval state in northern Russia, centred on the city of Novgorod on the Volkhov river, which from the twelfth to the fifteenth century governed itself without a hereditary prince. Rich from the fur trade, it controlled a vast territory stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the Ural mountains and the White Sea.

Novgorod, "new town", was one of the oldest towns of the Rus'. According to the Primary Chronicle, the Varangian Rurik was invited to rule there in 862. Novgorod was a major trading post on the river route between the Baltic and the Black Sea, and its princes were often sons of the grand prince of Kyiv; Yaroslav the Wise ruled there before Kyiv, and his son Vladimir built the Cathedral of St Sophia in the 1040s.

In 1136 the people of Novgorod expelled their prince, Vsevolod, and from then on chose their own princes by contract, restricting them to military command and forbidding them to own land in Novgorod's territory. Real power lay with the city assembly, the veche, summoned by a bell, which elected officials: the posadnik, the mayor, the tysyatsky, the commander of the militia, and later the archbishop, who presided over a council of lords. In practice, wealthy boyar families, who owned huge estates, dominated politics, and veche meetings could be violent. Novgorod was sometimes called "Lord Novgorod the Great".

Novgorod's waterlogged clay soil preserved organic materials. Since 1951, archaeologists have found over a thousand letters written on birch bark, scratched with a stylus, dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. They include business notes, debts, family letters, complaints, love letters and the school exercises and drawings of a boy named Onfim, from the thirteenth century. They show that literacy was widespread among townspeople, including women and craftsmen. Wooden streets, houses and objects have also been excavated.

Novgorod's wealth came from its northern lands, where trappers and tributaries supplied furs, especially squirrel and sable, wax, honey and walrus ivory. Novgorod's expansion reached the Arctic and the Urals. German merchants of the Hanseatic League had a trading office, the Peterhof, in Novgorod from the twelfth century, one of the League's four main foreign offices, trading furs and wax for cloth, silver, salt and herring. Novgorod also traded with Gotland, Sweden and the Baltic.

Novgorod faced Swedes and German crusaders to the west. In 1240 Prince Alexander, who ruled Novgorod, defeated the Swedes on the Neva river, earning the name Nevsky. In April 1242 he defeated the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Knights on the frozen Lake Peipus, the Battle on the Ice, later celebrated in Sergei Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky of 1938. Novgorod escaped the Mongol destruction of 1237–1240 because spring thaws made the marshes impassable, but it paid tribute to the Golden Horde.

Novgorod was a centre of icon painting and architecture, with many stone churches, such as the Church of the Transfiguration, decorated in 1378 by the painter Theophanes the Greek. Its school of icon painting, with bright colours, was distinctive.

In the fifteenth century, Novgorod was caught between the rising Grand Principality of Moscow and Lithuania. Some boyars, led by Marfa Boretskaya, the widow of a posadnik, sought an alliance with Lithuania. Ivan III of Moscow invaded and defeated Novgorod's army at the Shelon river in 1471. In 1478 he annexed Novgorod, removed the veche bell to Moscow and deported many leading families, replacing them with Muscovites. In 1494 he closed the Hanseatic office. In 1570 Ivan IV, suspecting treason, massacred thousands of Novgorod's inhabitants.

Our maps show the Novgorod Republic on the 1279, 1300 and 1400 maps. Its largest outline, about 910,000 square kilometres on the 1279 map, lies almost entirely in today's Russia, with a small part in Finland. The site of Saint Petersburg lies inside it. On the 1492 map, the region is part of the Grand Principality of Moscow.