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Biography

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Xenia of Tarusa, known in the Rus' chronicles as Kseniya Yuryevna, was a princess of the house of Tarusa who became Grand Princess of Tver and of Vladimir in the second half of the thirteenth century. She was the daughter of Yuri Mikhailovich, prince of Tarusa, a small appanage principality on the Oka River whose rulers belonged to the Olgovichi, the Chernigov line of the Rurikid dynasty and descendants of Prince Mikhail of Chernigov. Almost nothing is recorded of her childhood or of the year of her birth; the surviving narrative sources introduce her only as the wife of a major northeastern prince. Tarusa itself, from which her epithet is taken, was the seat of her father's principality in the lands of what is now central Russia, in the period after the Mongol invasion when the older unity of Kievan Rus' had given way to a constellation of principalities under the suzerainty of the Golden Horde.

In the mid-thirteenth century, after the death of his first wife, Yaroslav Yaroslavich took Xenia as his second consort. Yaroslav, a younger brother of Alexander Nevsky and a son of Grand Prince Yaroslav II Vsevolodovich of Vladimir, had received Tver as his hereditary appanage around the late 1240s and in 1264 obtained the senior title of Grand Prince of Vladimir. The marriage therefore linked the rising house of Tver with the Tarusa princes. Their son Mikhail Yaroslavich was born in 1271. That same year, or immediately thereafter, Yaroslav died on his return from a journey to the Horde, leaving Xenia a widow and the infant Mikhail without his father. Yaroslav's elder son from his previous marriage, Svyatoslav, succeeded in Tver for a time; Mikhail later became prince of Tver and, in the early fourteenth century, Grand Prince of Vladimir.

As dowager princess, Xenia remained in Tver during her son's minority and is attested in the chronicles as a continuing presence at the Tver court through the later thirteenth century. The sources do not describe a formal, independent regency in the Western sense, but her status as mother of the heir and widow of a grand prince placed her among the most prominent women of northeastern Rus' in the decades after the Mongol conquest. The political life of Tver in this period was dominated by the rivalry with Moscow for the grand princely patent issued by the khans, a struggle that would later cost Mikhail his life. Xenia lived long enough to see her son established as prince of Tver, though she died before his fatal confrontation with the Horde.

Later in life, following a custom widespread among widowed Rus' princesses, Xenia took monastic vows and received the name Maria. She died in 1312 and was buried in Tver in the Cathedral of the Holy Transfiguration, the principal church and necropolis of the Tver princes. She did not live to witness the death of Mikhail, who in 1318 was executed at the Horde after a contest with the princes of Moscow for the grand princely title and who was thereafter venerated as a passion-bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church. Through Mikhail and his descendants—among them the later venerated princess Anna of Kashin—Xenia became an ancestress of the Tver dynasty that remained a principal rival of Moscow until Tver's annexation in the late fifteenth century. The chronicles preserve her memory chiefly in genealogical and necrological notices rather than in an independent vita; her historical importance rests on her place in the Tver princely house and on the subsequent sanctification of her son.

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