Lord Novgorod the Great: a Rus' city on the Volkhov that by chronicle tradition called Rurik to rule, became a merchant republic governed by its assembly and archbishop, traded with the Hanseatic League, and fell to Ivan III of Moscow in 1478.
Novgorod lies on the Volkhov river just north of Lake Ilmen, on the waterway that linked the Baltic, through Lake Ladoga, to the rivers running south to Kyiv and the Black Sea and east to the Volga. From that position it became the second city of Kievan Rus', the capital of a vast northern hinterland stretching to the White Sea and the Urals, and from the twelfth century until 1478 a self-governing republic that called itself Lord Novgorod the Great.
Its waterlogged clay has preserved the medieval city better than almost any other in Europe. Excavations since 1951 have uncovered timber-paved streets, houses and workshops laid down layer upon layer from the tenth century to the fifteenth, together with more than a thousand letters scratched on birch bark by merchants, landowners, priests and children.
The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kyiv in the early twelfth century, dates the calling of the Varangian Rurik to rule the northern tribes to 862 and places him at Novgorod. Archaeology gives a more complicated picture: the fortified settlement of Ryurikovo Gorodishche, two kilometres upriver, was occupied by Scandinavian and Slavic traders from the mid-ninth century, while the town of Novgorod itself, whose name means 'new town', grew up in the tenth. By the chronicle account Rurik's kinsman Oleg moved south and took Kyiv around 882, after which Novgorod was usually held by a son of the prince of Kyiv.
Novgorod's backing made princes. Vladimir Sviatoslavich returned from Scandinavia to Novgorod around 980 to win Kyiv, and his son Yaroslav the Wise, prince in Novgorod, rewarded the townsmen who helped him take Kyiv in 1016 with privileges later remembered as the origin of their liberties. The Cathedral of Saint Sophia, built by Yaroslav's son in 1045–1050, still stands in the kremlin.
In 1136 the Novgorodians expelled their prince, Vsevolod Mstislavich, and from then on they chose and dismissed princes by contract. Real power lay with the city's own institutions. The veche, an assembly that met at Yaroslav's Court by the market, elected the posadnik (mayor) and the tysyatsky (commander of the militia), and from 1156 it also chose the bishop, raised to archbishop in 1165, whose see became the republic's richest landlord and its formal head.
The veche was not a democracy. The boyar families who owned the northern estates dominated it, and the city's five 'ends', each with its own assembly, fought one another in street battles on the Great Bridge over the Volkhov. But the republic's treaties show princes swearing to keep Novgorod's customs, to hold no estates in its lands and to judge only together with the posadnik, limits unknown anywhere else in Rus'.
The republic's wealth came from its hinterland. Novgorod's collectors took furs, wax, walrus ivory and silver as tribute from the Finnic and Ugric peoples of the northern forests as far as the Urals, and sold them in the city's markets to German and Scandinavian merchants for cloth, salt and silver.
The western trade was organised by German merchants. Gotland traders established the Gothic Court in the twelfth century, and by the thirteenth the Hanseatic kontor of St Peter's Court, the Peterhof, was one of the League's four great foreign stations, with its own church, statutes and warehouses, trading under treaties renewed with the city through the century.
Novgorod also faced Swedish and German crusading against the Orthodox Rus'. Its prince Alexander Yaroslavich defeated a Swedish force on the Neva in 1240, earning the name Nevsky, and in 1242 defeated knights of the Livonian Order on the ice of Lake Peipus. Crucially, Novgorod was never taken by the Mongols: their army turned back about a hundred kilometres short of the city in 1238, and Alexander Nevsky later chose to submit to the census and tribute of the Golden Horde rather than resist it.
In the fifteenth century the rising grand principality of Moscow demanded Novgorod's obedience. A party of boyars led by Marfa Boretskaya, widow of a posadnik, looked to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for protection; Ivan III treated this as treason, invaded in 1471, destroyed the Novgorodian army on the Shelon river and imposed the Treaty of Korostyn.
In 1478 Ivan returned, besieged the city and forced its surrender. The veche bell was taken down and carried to Moscow, the office of posadnik abolished, and over the following years thousands of boyar and merchant families were deported and replaced by Muscovite servitors. In 1494 Ivan closed the Peterhof and imprisoned its German merchants, and Novgorod's life as a great independent trading city was over.
Novgorod was two towns facing each other across the Volkhov. On the west bank the Sofia side held the kremlin, with the cathedral and the archbishop's palace; on the east bank the Trade side held the market, Yaroslav's Court with the veche bell, and the churches of the merchant associations. The Great Bridge between them was the city's main thoroughfare and, in times of faction, its battlefield.
Almost everything else was built of wood. Streets were paved with split logs and relaid as the ground rose, more than twenty times on the same line in places, and the houses, workshops and fences beside them survive in the waterlogged soil with their contents. Stone was kept for churches, which boyars, streets and merchant guilds competed to build, among them the Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyina Street, painted in 1378 by Theophanes the Greek.