The Mongol invasion was also reflected in the oratorical genre, one of the main genres of Old Russian literature. Serapion of Vladimir was a fine master of this genre in the thirteenth century. Very little is known about Serapion’s life. We know that up to 1274 he was Archimandrite of […]

A characteristic feature of hagiography was the desire to observe the canons which had grown up over the many centuries of hagiographic literature. These canons gave the Lives of saints an abstract, rhetorical nature. Historical reality, political tenden­cies, folk legends and the real facts of the life of the person […]

Alexander (born circa 1220, died in 1263) was Prince of Novgorod from 1236 to 1263 and Grand Prince of Vladimir from 1252 to 1263. Both during his reign in Novgorod and as grand prince he led Russia’s struggle against the German and Swedish invaders. In 1240 Swedish knights invaded the […]

In examining the Rostov chronicle above, we mentioned that among the tales of Russian princes who died a martyr’s death during the rule of Batu the Princess Maria chronicle of 1263 contains, a record of the murder of Maria’s father, Prince Michael of Chernigov, in 1246 in the Horde. During […]

The Lives of zealots of the Church written in the second half of the thirteenth century can be characterised in general as works which followed the hagiographical canons more strictly than the princely lives of the same period. Examples of this are The Life of Abraham of Smolensk compiled by […]

1                       An Arabian historian of the early thirteenth century, Ibn al Athir, described the Mongol invasion as a disaster the like of which history had never known before and wrote that the conquerors “did not take pity on anyone, and killed women, men and infants”. (See: Тизенгаузен В. В. Сборник […]