The Time of Troubles, 1267 - 1287
Grand Patriarch Andrzej II of Ruthenia
Born: 1257
Reigned: 1267 - 1269
Grand Matriarch Elżbieta of Ruthenia
Born: 1208
Reigned: 1269 - 1279
Grand Patriarch Andrei III Sviatpolkovich of Ruthenia
Born: 1232
Reigned: 1279 - 1287
Ruthenia had suffered through civil wars before. What made the period between the ascension of Andrzej II and the death of Andrei III so distinct was not one war, but a cascading series of wars that lead to a near collapse of central authority. In the aftermath, it would be easy to point fingers: Andrzej I’s favoritism, Elżbieta’s overweening (some said unwomanly) ambition, Davyd’s indifference, the hubris of the Krivichis. However, the larger problem was with the Silesian rule itself: the legitimacy of the throne had been destroyed during the revolt of the farsan and the Godziembas had been unable to rebuild it. The monarchy had become a house of cards, that needed only a stiff breeze to knock it over.
With the announcement of Davyd’s death in 1267, the conspiracy to place Elżbieta on the throne began in earnest. Her son, Patriarch Andrei Sviatpolkovich of the White Rus’, ensured that the Krivichis would support her. The patriarchs of Novgorod and Lithuania were quick to support her as well, and as we shall see, not out of love for her. Her most prominent supporter was High Chief Leszek of Crimea, a renowned warrior who would later serve as her chief commander and adviser on martial matters. It was he who delivered the ultimatum to Andrzej II’s Regency Council on December 7, 1268, which was predictably refused.
Many boyars stayed loyal to Andrzej II during the crisis, but not always out of loyalty. Some, particularly in the area around Kiev, supported the Godziemba dynasty but just as many saw opportunities with a weak child monarch who might be influenced. So then, on March 13, 1269, Patriarch Jarosław II of Sweden demanded that the crown renounce several of its powers arrogated under Andzej I’s revision to the
Russkaya Pravda, or else Sweden would join the rebels. Left without much choice, the Regency Council conceded.
Even with the crown making concessions such as these, the rebels could raise more than twice their number on the field. The motivation of such men varied, but they were not necessarily self-serving any more than the loyalists were necessarily patriotic. The patriarchs of Novgorod and Lithuania seem to have expected that Elżbieta would be more responsive to the boyar’s demands, while her Polish supporters largely hoped that the dynastic connection with the Krivichis would give her the legitimacy to be a more ambitious monarch than her predecessors. Elżbieta, so close to her long-held ambition, wound up telling both sides what they wanted to hear. She was by her own reckoning an old woman, who had the past two decades of rightful rule stolen from her, and this gave her action a heedless quality. The rightful matriarch would not be denied now.
The Krivichi army met the royalists on the plains of Chornobyl in a cool spring morning in 1269. Liszek commanded the Krivichi left, while Andrei held the right. Elżbieta led the vanguard herself, riding in front. Her warriors were concerned that the leadership of a woman might invite bad luck; to rally her troops, Elżbieta gave a speech, ending in the famous claim:
YA znayu, chto u menya telo slaboy i nemoshchnoy zhenshchiny; no u menya serdtse i zheludok tsarya, a takzhe tsarya Russkogo. ("I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a Tsar, and of a Tsar of the 'Rus too.")
In the popular imagination, Elżbieta’s Chornobyl oration inspired her warriors to ride forth and defeat the royalist army and force Andrzej II’s surrender. In reality, as we have seen, her army far outnumbered the Regency’s and she was herself a sound commander--the royalists quickly crumbled under the weight of superior numbers and began to flee back to Kiev.
Elżbieta ordered a march on the capital and then settled in for a siege. She was prepared to wait for a year or more, but in truth divisions among the regents revealed themselves almost immediately. It soon became clear that a strong faction within Andrzej II’s court were willing to surrender the throne to her if he was confirmed in his rule over Kiev and the surrounding environs--what was called the kingdom, rather than the empire, of Ruthenia. Two months into the siege, Andrzej’s Grand Allamah snuck out a postern gate under cover of darkness to extend this offer informally.
Elżbieta was amenable. If her nephew would willingly submit to her rule, it would help to bring around his most ardent supporters. She had not intended to rule from Kiev in the first place, preferring to rule from the Krivichi capital of Kernave surrounded by allies. However, this proved to be a strategic mistake: Kiev had been the historic capital of Ruthenia since Dyre the Stranger, and so long as Andrzej continued to rule there--even as a vassal--he would seem to many as the grand patriarch in waiting. This would be disastrous for Elżbieta’s rule.
Elżbieta was crowned in a grand ceremony on October 3, 1269, the first female head of state in the four centuries of Ruthenian history. After much discussion among the clerics and scribes, she took the title Grand Matriarch--while this was typically the title of an imperial consort, she saw it differently. She was, in the imperial edicts of the period, mother of the ‘Rus, both protective and fierce.
If she was the mother to all, however, it was of a squabbling and dysfunctional family. At issue was the proposed revision to the Russkaya Pravda, which Andrzej’s regents had drafted but never published. Jarosław II was adamant that the revision be promulgated, and although he had been a loyalist during the late rebellion he found support from Novgorod and Lithuania. The Krivichi faction opposed this, seeing no reason why the powers of the patriachate should be watered down to appease--in Liszek’s inflammatory words--’the mewling of traitors and apostates.’
The tense political deadlock exploded when the Grand Matriarch sided with the Krivichis, declaring that she had not taken the throne in order to leave it a shell of itself. Krzesław Lewicki, patriarch of Novgorod, exploded in rage that he had been misled; he stalked out of Kernave and was soon seen calling upon his cousin Jarosław II in Uppsala. Soon the patriarch of Lithuania had joined them, and the three mighty boyars were deep in plotting a rebellion of their own. This time, they would settle for nothing less than complete independence.
War broke out in the spring of 1272. The boyars had planned a lightning strike on Kernave, hoping to seize the capital and force a deal with a minimum of bloodshed. However, their treachery had been discovered, and while they were attempting to ford the Neris High Chieftain Lieszek led twenty thousand Belorussians to repel them. The result was a pyrrhic victory; Lieszek was obliged to retreat but countless numbers of Swedes and Lithuanians died on the riverbank or drowned in the river.
In the east, a new rebellion flared up. The young patriarch of Mordvinia, a steppe-Polish noble who fancied himself a warlord in the model of Temujin, declared his people destined to consolidate the fractured Mongolian empire. He had an emissary from Kernave executed and sent his horse archers to pillage the nearby Ruthenian holdings. The landscape was shifting in Kiev as well. Andrzej, now a strapping youth of fifteen, was furious at his regents’ surrender, and lent his support to a takeover by the warhawks on the regency council. The new regents began a series of internal conflicts to seize land from vassals--all the while building allies for a war for the throne. Andrzej was growing into the model
fāris, a talented warrior with a pious commitment to Allah and good courtly manners; with Elżbieta’s reign sparking chaos in the north, the loyalties of the southern boyars began to drift back to their deposed grand patriarch. Most significantly, Andrzej’s Oskyldr blood won him the loyalty of the Patriarch of Thessonlika--now considered the informal head of the imperial dynasty.
The war in the north settled into a bloody stalemate. The Grand Matriarch was too powerful to be dislodged but any incursions into Novgorod or Lithuania proved to be costly failures. What’s more, Kernave was just on the border with the rebel-held lands, leading to repeated assaults by Baltic raiders burning farms, slaughtering villagers, and then riding back to their homeland. Attempts to defend the capital bled men away from the offensive, making it that much more unlikely that the war would end sooner. As things became more grim, Elżbieta’s stubborn resolve alienated her from her courtier. Meals were delivered outside her rooms, and left untouched often as not. In the last years of her life, only her son Andrei would be permitted to see her. Otherwise, she communicated through notes written in her careful Abrahamic script.
On November 18, 1277, Andrzej II issued an ultimatum demanding that she step down for ‘the rightful patriarch.’ The missive was left for Elżbieta with her morning meal. Two hours later, it was returned to Andrei with a single word added:
nyet.
The campaign season of 1278 went well for Andrzej and his restorationist army. They advanced into the traditional lands of the White Rus’, and by the fall most of Belarus (including the wealthy city of Minsk, once the Krivichi capital) was in his hand. With his Saloniki allies, Andrzej outnumbered his opponents, but his instincts were cautious and he saw no reason to overextend himself. He would march on Kernave in 1279, he vowed.
In Kernave, Elżbieta issued repeated orders for offensives from her bedchamber. Her seclusion had provided a useful cover for her declining health, but as the year progressed it became increasingly clear that her grasp of the strategic situation was slipping and she would not have long to live. Prince Andrei took more control over day-to-day operations, but as his mother lingered between life and death, strategic decision-making in Kernave was effectively stuck in neutral. It was not until the early morning of January 8, 1279 that Elżbieta finally died in her bed. She was then seventy years old.
The new Grand Patriarch, now known as Andrei III Svaitpolkovich [1], sprung into long-delayed action. He issued an immediate cease-fire with the rebel boyars of Sweden, Novgorod, and Lithuania, tacitly recognizing their independence as a de facto reality. He then left Kernave in the hands of his oldest son, Gleb Andreovich, while he led the royal army on an offensive against the restorationists. Andrei would not face his opponent in battle, however. Instead, the Grand Patriarch led his army on a large looping route around the enemy, to lead an attack on the traditional lands of Ruthenia.
Andrzej II was too powerful to be assaulted directly, but his people were not. The restorationist army depending on food and other supplies from the farmlands around Kiev, so Andrei III marched there and attacked their supply lines from the source. Peasant farmers were slaughtered in front of their burning farms, and their corpses dumped into nearby wells. Merchant ships on the Dnieper were intercepted and their cargo stolen; the merchants either swore fealty to their rightful liege or were killed.
Predictably, disruption in the restorationist supply lines obliged their army off the land in Belarus, leading to raids on local farms. When Andrzej learned of the atrocities being done in his homeland, moreover, he flew into a rage and swore to meet the Krivichi blow for blow. He took Kernave in late 1279; Prince Gleb was kept in a genteel captivity but the rest of the imperial household was slaughtered to a man. The Slaughter of Kernave, as it became known, inspired Andrei III to respond by seizing Odessa and slaughtering their garrison in turn.
These scorched-earth tactics had largely been a feature of the great holy wars, where Christians and Muslims both saw fit to dispense with normal rules of war when the heathen was concerned. The repeated cycle of rebellion and civil war visited them upon the Russian heartland as well, with a tremendous human cost. In addition to the direct atrocities, Andrei and Andrzej’s assaults disrupted the harvests from 1279 until 1285 in some of the most productive agricultural lands in Ruthenia. Food shortages led to famine, which led in turn to outbreaks of cholera and other infectious diseases.
And for all the human suffering, neither side seemed likely to win the war. Andrzej II came the closest in 1279, when he had seized Kernave and held Andrei’s heir hostage; but so long as Andrei III was in the field, there was little Andrzej could do to secure the peace. Andrei refused battle, however, and when Andrzej would advance he would retreat into the steppes. The Grand Patriarch reached a tacit alliance with the mad king of Mordvinia, and neither would move against each other.
So the war continued, year after year. The countryside burned, the peasantry fled or starved or were killed, trade on the Dnieper slowed to a trickle, the debts of the realm mounted. Morale was rock bottom on both sides. Andrzej II once gave a blistering address to his men that barely staved off mutiny. Andrei III preferred to simply execute those opposed. And yet neither side seemed closer to victory in 1285 then they were five years before.
Finally, Andrzej II was confronted by a group of his senior councilors, who told him flatly what had been apparent long before: he would never again sit the throne of Ruthenia, and he was wasting the lives of his people by trying. To his credit, Andrzej listened. A peace mission was sent to Andrei’s camp, then in Cherkassy, to offer a truce. When the councillors arrived at the imperial war camp, they made it clear to all that the Patriarch Andrzej intended to renounce his claim on the throne. This effectively boxed Andrei in; he could not refuse a peace on those terms without facing a revolt from his own soldiers.
The peace of Cherkassy did not truly end the bloodshed, however. In Poland, a crofter’s son named Imran Czetwertynski declared that the violence of the civil war signalled the end of the world and the rise of the true Mahdi (by which he of course meant himself). This apocalyptic religious fervor won the support of many in the peasantry, who were angry, fearful, and desperate to understand the horrifying events of the past twenty years. The Poznan Mahdi--as he would be known--led a peasant’s army that numbered thirty thousand at its peak. Andrei would spend the campaign season of 1286 putting down this rebellion until Czetwertynski and his followers were cut down to a man.
When he finally returned to Kernave in the fall of 1286, Andrei was a broken man: exhausted and depressed. He bore a wound on his side from the final battle against Czetwertynski’s rebels that would plague him off and on until his death. That he remained on the throne at all was no mean feat, of course, but it had come at a profound cost. The death toll was impossible to contemplate. The crown was deeply in debt, and commanded less territory than it had even during the fall of the Oskyldrs a century before.
It would take considerable leadership to bring the empire back from the brink, and Andrei didn’t have it in him. In his final year, Andrei seems to have just given up. While he did not become a recluse like his mother, he was a listless presence at court and said little in council meetings. He was seen often wandering the ramparts of his castle late at night, staring at the moon with a haunted expression. When his death finally came, on October 15, 1287, Andrei seemed almost grateful to go. The task of knitting Ruthenia back together would fall to Prince Gleb, while he could rest at last.
[1] The war between Andrzej II and Andrei III is sometimes called “the war of two Andrews” in older English textbooks.
When all seems well but I know something bad will happen I cannot help but think what events in what order will need to happen for all hell to break loose.
