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Biography

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Maximus (Greek: Maximos; in East Slavic sources Maksim) was a hierarch of Greek origin who served as Metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus' from 1283 until his death in 1305. No reliable chronicle or patriarchal document preserves his year or place of birth, and almost nothing is known of his life before he was sent from Constantinople. He was appointed to the Kievan metropolitanate by the Ecumenical Patriarchate during the reign of Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos, after a vacancy that followed the death of Metropolitan Cyril II in 1281. Like other medieval metropolitans of Rus', he remained a suffragan of Constantinople rather than an independent patriarch, and he belonged to the long series of Greek prelates dispatched to govern the church of the Rus' lands.

His metropolitanate coincided with the political fragmentation of the Rus' principalities and with the suzerainty of the Golden Horde. Kiev, the traditional seat of the see, had never recovered from the Mongol sack of 1240 and remained exposed to later raids. In accordance with the custom of the Mongol period, Maximus had to obtain a khan's patent (yarlyk) recognizing his office. From that position he administered the Orthodox Church across the Rus' lands, consecrating bishops for the eparchies and maintaining canonical ties with Constantinople. Surviving sources do not yield a detailed itinerary of his travels or a full list of his ordinations, but they present him as the ruling hierarch of a church whose southern center was in decline.

The act for which he is best remembered is the transfer of the metropolitan cathedra from Kiev to Vladimir-on-the-Klyazma, generally dated to 1299. Rus' chronicles record that, citing the desolation of Kiev, he moved north with the clergy of the cathedral of Saint Sophia. Vladimir, seat of the northeastern grand principality, offered greater security and stood in a region whose princes were accumulating power. The relocation did not abolish the historic title of Kiev, but it shifted the effective center of church administration to the northeast and prepared the way for the later association of the metropolitanate with Moscow under his successors. A later pious tradition, connected with the Maximovskaya Icon of the Mother of God, relates that the Theotokos appeared to Maximus and placed an omophorion upon him in connection with this change of residence; the story reflects subsequent veneration rather than a contemporary documentary record.

Maximus died in Vladimir on 6 December 1305 and was buried in the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God in that city. His death was followed by a contested succession before Metropolitan Peter was installed some years later. Maximus came to be venerated as a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church, with his principal commemoration on 6 December; his tomb in the Dormition Cathedral was a focus of local honor. Beyond the appointment, the transfer of the see, the date of death, and the place of burial, the written record of his life remains sparse, as is typical for many thirteenth-century hierarchs of Rus'.

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