Abstract

This study seeks to identify the origins and subsequent evolution of the “heroic” interpretation of princely conduct during the assault on Vladimir by Batu’s forces in February 1238, and to assess the credibility of that interpretation. Its object is the complex of accounts of Batu’s invasion preserved within Russian chronicles from the late thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, together with works of early domestic historiography of the second half of the eighteenth century. Analysis of these texts indicates that, in the earliest chronicle monuments, the princes were not represented as heroic resisters of the conquerors. The “heroic” reading that later became entrenched in historiography emerged from a subsequent reinterpretation of the Laurentian Chronicle’s narrative, which itself does not speak of any active struggle by the princes against the Tatars. Efforts to cast their actions in heroic terms begin to appear from the first third of the fifteenth century, finding their most vivid expression in the account of the First Sofia Chronicle. At each successive stage of rethinking this episode, the Vladimir princes were attributed ever more bellicose intentions toward the invaders. Within later chronicle compilations — up to and including the Nikon Chronicle of the first third of the sixteenth century — this approach came to predominate among learned compilers. The Nikon Chronicle’s interpretation, with only minor refinements, passed into early domestic historiography, shaping the works of V.N. Tatishchev, M.M. Shcherbatov, Catherine II, I.M. Stritter, and others. In this respect Shcherbatov’s History stands somewhat apart: while endorsing the “heroic” construal of princely conduct, he nonetheless reproached the princes for a “spirit of immoderate piety,” which, in his view, contributed to their refusal to “defend the Fatherland” and thus to defeat. This historiographical position, however, did not develop in subsequent generations: N.M. Karamzin, S.M. Solov’ev, and other nineteenth-century classics of Russian historiography continued to interpret the events surrounding the siege of Vladimir in accordance with the stance consolidated in the Nikon Chronicle.