Andrei Bogolyubsky
Andrei Bogolyubsky sacked Kiev in 1169, refused to live in it, and moved the centre of Russian power permanently to the north-east. He was a grandson of Vladimir Monomakh, raised in the forested territory of Suzdalia rather than the Dnieper south, and when his father sent him to govern a southern town he simply left and went home, taking with him an icon of the Virgin from a convent near Kiev that became the Vladimir Mother of God, the most venerated image in Russia. He made Vladimir his capital and built at a scale nothing in the north had seen - the Dormition Cathedral, the Golden Gate, and the small church on the Nerl that is the most admired building of medieval Russia - importing masons from as far as the Holy Roman Empire. In 1169 his coalition took Kiev and sacked it for three days, plundering the churches, which had not been done to the mother of Russian cities by Russians before. He then declined the throne, installed a younger brother as a subordinate, and stayed in Vladimir - the clearest possible statement that the seniority system was over and that power now lay where the ruler was rather than in a particular city. He ruled autocratically, expelled his brothers and his father's boyars, and was murdered in his bedchamber in 1174 by a conspiracy of his own courtiers, one of them his wife's relative. The principality he built was the one the Mongols found sixty years later, and Moscow grew inside it. His epithet comes from Bogolyubovo, the fortified residence he built outside Vladimir rather than living in the city. The icon he carried north, the Vladimir Mother of God, was later moved to Moscow and is now in a church attached to the Tretyakov Gallery. His murder was followed by three days of rioting in which his officials were killed and his residence looted. Forensic reconstruction from his skeleton in the 1930s confirmed the chronicle account of the wounds. He was canonised by the Russian church in 1702.
- Lived: 1111 CE – 1174 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: ruler
