Suggest an Edit — Vladimir of Novgorod

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Biography

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Vladimir Yaroslavich, remembered in the church as Saint Vladimir of Novgorod, was a prince of Kievan Rus' in the eleventh century. He was the eldest son of Grand Prince Yaroslav I, known as Yaroslav the Wise, and of Ingegerd, daughter of King Olof Skötkonung of Sweden, who received the baptismal name Irina. Born about 1020, not long after Yaroslav's marriage and his establishment in Kiev, Vladimir belonged to the generation that consolidated Christian princely rule in the lands of Rus'. While still young he was installed by his father as prince of Novgorod, a dignity usually dated to the mid-1030s. Novgorod was then the chief city of the north, a hub of Baltic and Scandinavian trade and a key military outpost of the Kievan dynasty.

Chronicle notices of his reign, though brief, show him acting as his father's lieutenant in war. In 1042 he campaigned against the Yam, a Finnic people on the northwestern frontier. The following year Yaroslav placed him in command of a large naval expedition against Constantinople. The Rus'-Byzantine conflict of 1043 ended in failure: a storm wrecked much of the fleet, and Byzantine forces defeated those who reached the shore. Vladimir survived and returned to Novgorod. His most enduring achievement was ecclesiastical. In 1045 he laid the foundations of a stone cathedral dedicated to the Holy Wisdom, Saint Sophia, in Novgorod, replacing an earlier wooden church. Built with the aid of masters from Kiev and consecrated about 1050, the cathedral became the seat of the Novgorod bishops, among them Luka Zhidiata, and remains one of the oldest monumental churches in the Russian lands.

Vladimir died on 4 October 1052, at about thirty-two years of age, and was interred in the Sophia Cathedral. He left a son, Rostislav Vladimirovich, later prince of Tmutarakan, from whom the Rostislavichi of Galicia traced their descent. The name of Vladimir's wife is not preserved in the principal Rus' chronicles. After his death the Novgorod throne passed according to his father's arrangements; Yaroslav himself died two years later.

From an early period Novgorod honored Vladimir as a right-believing prince and as the founder of its chief temple. His relics were kept in Saint Sophia. He belongs to the category of princely saints of Rus', commemorated for piety and church-building rather than for monastic life or martyrdom. He was neither a monk nor a bishop, and he never held patriarchal or papal office. The Orthodox Church keeps his memory on 4 October, the anniversary of his death, and he is also remembered in the synaxis of the saints of Novgorod. Surviving evidence for his life is limited to laconic chronicle entries and to the cathedral that still stands; later hagiography elaborated little beyond those facts.

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