The Sack of Kiev and the Shift to the North-East
By the middle of the twelfth century the rota succession had done its work: Kievan Rus was a dozen principalities whose princes fought over a title that was worth progressively less. The trade route to Byzantium that had made Kiev rich was decaying as the steppe grew more dangerous and as the Crusades opened Mediterranean alternatives, while the forested north-east - Suzdalia, Vladimir, and the small town of Moscow first mentioned in 1147 - was filling with settlers moving away from the raids. Andrei Bogolyubsky ruled there and had already made his position clear by abandoning a southern posting to go home. In March 1169 his coalition of eleven princes took Kiev by storm and sacked it for three days: houses, monasteries and the churches, including Saint Sophia, were stripped, and the population was carried off. The chronicles register genuine shock, because Kiev had been plundered by Russians rather than by steppe nomads. What followed mattered more than the sack. Andrei took the title of grand prince and then declined to move; he installed a younger brother in Kiev as a subordinate and stayed at Vladimir, where he had built the Dormition Cathedral and the Golden Gate and where he kept the icon he had taken from a convent near Kiev twenty years earlier. Power was now wherever the strongest prince chose to live. Kiev was sacked again in 1203 and destroyed by the Mongols in 1240. The Hypatian Chronicle names the plundering of the churches as the thing that made the sack unprecedented, and attributes the disaster to the sins of the Kievans, which is how chroniclers explained defeats. Novgorod beat Andrei's army outside its own walls the following year, so the coalition's reach had limits. Kiev remained a prize worth fighting over for another two generations without being worth living in. The town of Moscow appears in the written record for the first time twenty-two years before this, as a place where two princes agreed to meet.
- Year: 1169 CE
- Category: Military
