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Cahiers slaves n°7
L’île et le sacré dans la Russie du Nord
A SWEDISH CRUSADER KING
AS RUSSIAN ORTHODOX SAINT
ON THE VALAMO ARCHIPELAGO ?
by
J. LIND
(University of Southern Denmark, Odense)
In 1347 King Magnus Eriksson of Sweden undertook a crusade against Novgorodian territory. In this he was inspired by the powerful aristocrat Birgitta Birgersdaughter, in 1391 canonized by Pope as Saint Birgitta on the basis of her heavenly visions and revelations in which she was spoken to by both Christ and the Virgin Mary.
Some of these revelations were directed at King Magnus. In one of these revelations the King was criticized for having waged war against fellow-Christians, in-casu Danes at Copenhagen in 1343. Instead he should turn his vasals and servants against pagans and infidels in the East where the Christian faith and love could be increased. In another revelation Birgitta reproached the king for preparing a secular war not a crusade. In organizing the crusade, the king should call upon priests and monks who could refute the errors of the pagans and teach them the Christian faith. Therefore the king were to proceed under two banners.
Under the first banner, Christ’s Passion, he should offer mercy and peace when approaching the pagans. Only in case the infidels were not responsive to his advice and admonitions should the king raise the other banner, the banner of the Sword of Justice. In short King Magnus should first attempt to convince the infidels or pagans by peaceful means. Only as a last resort should he take to the sword.
These revelations are preserved in texts dating to soon after Birgitta’s death in Rome in 1373.
King Magnus tried to follow Birgitta’s program for a Crusade. Although in Swedish sources we hear little more about how the crusade actually progressed, the King's compliance with the program is the reason why we are confronted with such a strange prologue to a military campaign as the one we read in the Russian chronicles. According to these King Magnus made his intention to lead an army against Novgorod known through emissaries who first tried to induce the Novgorodians to send their philosophers to a meeting with his philosophers. At the meeting they were to debate the faith and explore which was better, his or their. If the Novgorodians could convince the Swedes that their faith was best, he would convert to their faith. If his was proved best, they should convert to his.
Russian historians, who have been unaware of the contents of Birgitta’s revelations, have tended to dismiss this tale as a fig of imagination on the part of the Russian chronicler. As we have seen, it was not ! By advertising his intention and thereby forego the possibility of surprising the Novgorodians by his attack, he demonstrated that he responded seriously to the spiritual advice he had received from Birgitta.
Because the Novgorodians, not surprisingly, chose not to accept King Magnus’ offer but referred him to the Patriarch in Constantinople in case he wished to discuss religion, the King proceeded with the crusade under the banner of the Sword of Justice.
Despite King Magnus managed to conquer one of the most important fortresses barring the way to the interior of Novgorod (Oreshek) almost immediately, and also started to baptize the Ingrians into his faith, the crusade ended in disaster for Magnus. Not only did he soon lose the territory he had conquered, but having returned home he was blamed for the failure. Birgitta was of course not to be blamed since that either meant that her revelations were false or the Virgin Mary had been at fault. Instead Birgitta blamed the king of having brought too many troops instead of just relying on the Virgin who had ensured him that a just war could not be lost.
The crusade proved to be a turning point in Magnus' reign as well as in his personal life. The Black Death hit the country soon after he had come back from the crusade, the aristocracy rose against him, first in an attempt to replace him by his oldest son, and when he died, by inviting a German prince to the throne. King Magnus was deposed twice and after the last time he was kept prisoner for almost seven years before he was exiled to Norway, where his younger son was king. There he drowned in 1374 off the Norwegian coast, when he was shipwreck.
Somehow fairly exact information of this sad end became known in Russia, where an apocryphal testament, Rukopisanie Magnusha Sveiskago korolia, was written in the name of King Magnus. The text is closely linked to the Valaamskij Monastery and was probably written there soon after its foundation in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Soon after it was entered into a chronicle and from there copied in most of the later fifteenth and sixteenth century chronicles that were based on Novgorodian chronicle writing, represented by the Fourth Novgorod and First Sophia Chronicles.
According to the Testament King Magnus survived his last shipwreck and was carried by the wind on the keel of his ship to a Holy Saviour’s Monastery situated on a Polna river (manastyr‘ svætogo Spasa v Polnuº reku). There he was shorn as schema-monk, taking the name Grigorij, before he started to write his testament, dying in the monastery after just three days.
In his testament the King urges his brothers and the Swedes in general not to violate the “ kissing of the Cross ” as he had done, otherwise they would suffer the same disasters as he had done.
Why did a Russian author, presumably a monk on Valaam, write such a text ? Apart from being an extension of the hesychast movement of seeking to distant places in order to found monasteries, the foundation of Valaamskii Monastery was also a Novgorodian state affair. Its aim was to convert the pagan Karelians to orthodoxy, so that they were not tempted to be lured into accepting Catholicism from the Swedes and thereby accepting to become Swedish subjects, while, at the same time, transferring the territory on which they had settled to Sweden. That seems to have been the way the Swedes had managed during the fourteenth-fifteenth century to push their border with Novgorod towards the east.
We know that at least at the end of 16th Century Valamo did become associated with the defense of the Neva region against the Swedes. Over an erasure in the so-called Illuminated Chronicle, Licevoi svod, which was written in the 1560s (based on the Nikon Chronicle), a scribe twice brought Valaam into the account of the Battle on the Neva in 1240 in the Life of Aleksandr Nevskii. First when the Swedish Prince proclaimed his intention to conquer “ Staraia Ladoga, Novgorod and the whole Novgorod territory ”, the scribe added “ Up to Valaam ” (to Valaama). Next, when the Ingrian eider, Pelgusii, spotted the Swedish fleet he saw a boat following it, in which he recognized Saints Boris and Gleb coming to help their relative, Aleksandr, and he observed how their boat passed him and disappeared towards Valaam (na Valaam).
This threat to Novgorod and the subsequent religious mobilization must have renewed interest in King Magnus’ Crusade. Here it must be remembered that the early fifteenth century was the peak of Novgorodian chronicle writing and copying — compilating. In literary centers the chronicles were constantly copied and brought up to date, new chronicles were compiled on the basis of imported chronicles from other centers and regions of Russia, and were in their turn exported to monasteries or other literary centers. Knowledge of a region's history was therefore widespread and certainly always present in the literary centers : one of these centers was the Valamo monastery. It is well known that already in the fifteenth century it had a renowned scriptorium from which a number of MSS survives and that it also accumulated a substantial library, scattered after the Swedish conquests in 1578 and again in 1611.
The form King Magnus’ Crusade took baffled the Novgorodians. In contemporary Novgorod the invitation to debate the faith must have been met with the same disbelief that modem Russian historians have felt. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly this invitation that made King Magnus such an attractive subject to the author of the Testament. Seen against the background of King Magnus’ Birgittine Crusade, the Testament appears as a refined revenge on the part of the Novgorodian author. By letting King Magnus not only suffer defeat in his real-life crusade, but also ending his life by entering a Russian monastery and joining the Orthodox faith as a schema-monk, the author of the Testament made the king himself reach the conclusion that the Orthodox faith was indeed “ the best ”. Another notable feature of the Testament is that the author in this way turned King Magnus from being a crusader against Novgorod into becoming a defender of Novgorod’s territorial integrity against further Swedish encroachments.
As a text King Magnus’s “ Testament ” is unique in Old-Russian literature, although some features can be found in other texts. Thus King Magnus was not the only person who according to medieval Russian authors defied our modem notions of how to travel. Two otherwise well-documented saints according to their lives made no less spectacular journeys, Antonij Rimlianin (d. 1147), founder of the Antoniev Monastery, and Novgorod’s first archbishop, Ioann (d. 1186).
It is a common feature of the veneration of both these saints that it seems to have started only when their respective graves were “ discovered ”.
As a manifestation of Novgorodian mentality, however, our Testament does not stand alone. Concerning the impact the author must have intended to achieve, it strongly resembles the icon “ The Miracle of the Icon of God’s Mother of the Sign ” (Znamenie ot ikony Bogoroditsy) also known as “ The Battle between the Novgorodians and the Suzdalians ”. This icon was composed in Novgorod in the mid-fifteenth century, when the threat from Moscow against Novgorod’s independence was at its greatest. In the three copies that have been preserved, Novgorodian icon painters used the legend of the miraculous intervention of the icon during a siege of Novgorod in 1170, when Iliia-Ioann was archbishop, by a coalition of princes under the leadership of the Prince of Suzdal’, representing princely power against Novgorodian republicanism. With this composition the icon painters wanted to enhance the spirit of resistance against the Muscovites, representing in the fifteenth century the same princely power against Novgorodian republicanism as the Suzdalians had in the twelfth. In three bands, the legend is made visual. In the upper band the icon is carried from the church; in the middle band it is turned against the Suzdalians from the city wall, repelling their arrows; while in the lower band the Novgorodians make a sortie, led by four saints and eventually defeating the Suzdalians. Among these saints are the two Russian proto-martyrs Boris and Gleb, often seen as patron saints of Russia, St George and, significantly, Aleksandr Nevskii, father of the first Prince of Moscow.
In this way the icon painters turned not only St Boris and St Gleb, already called upon to help Aleksandr Nevskii, when he defeated the Swedes in 1240, but also St Aleksandr Nevskii himself, as ancestor of the Muscovite princely house, into champions for Novgorod against the Muscovites in what can only be seen as a Holy War. Just as the author of the Testament turned King Magnus against his successors on the Swedish throne in their future attempts to organize crusades against Novgorod. In both cases the intention is to strengthen, at least mentally, the resistance of the Novgorodians against Sweden and Moscow, respectively.
Both in this way, in his miraculous journey to a Russian monastery, his salvation after a sinful life by entering an Orthodox monastery as schema-monk, King Magnus resembles one type of Russian saints.
Above we have seen how important for the institution of a saint’s cult a tangible element like a grave was.
It is well-known that monks in the new Valamo Monastery, resurrected in 1715-19 when Russia had reconquered the region, after it had been lost to Sweden in 1611, claimed that King Magnus was buried in the monastery. This legend has genera1ly been dismissed as an eighteenth-century invention based on knowledge of the Testament. Let us, however, take a closer look at this legend. It is first recorded in the late eighteenth century, when Nikolai Ozeretskovskii in 1785 visited the monastery and was shown a grave with no inscription. But he was told by the monks that a Swedish prince had been buried there. According to the tales “ this prince had at some point been carried to Valamo by a strong storm, having lost his ship close to this island, where he then had stayed for the remainder of his life… ”. Later when the Finnish folklorist, Eljas Lönnrot, visited Valamo in 1828, there was already a wooden plate with an inscription, probably the same that subsequently could be read on a stone plate, damaged or destroyed during the Second World War. This rhymed text was, judging from two manuscripts in the library of the Valamo monastery, composed around 1800. Surprisingly it is not based on the Testament. There is no direct textual influence from the Testament. In addition to the legend recorded by Ozeretskovskii, the author now knew that the prince in question was Magnus, but he also offers two dates from Magnus' life which cannot be deduced from the Testament, that he was born in 1336 and died in 1371. This strongly suggests that the Testament itself was not known in the monastery at the time. If the 18th-century legend of Magnus’ death on Valamo was not based on direct knowledge of the Testament, then it must reflect a local tradition with roots back to the original monastery before it was discontinued by the Swedish conquest in 1611. That, in turn, suggests that monks already in the original Valamo Monastery had identified a grave as belonging to King Magnus in the same way as Archbishop Evfimii had graves in the Sofiia Cathedral identified. The only feasible reason for this is that they intended to institute a cult linked to King Magnus, as a sinning convert to Russian Orthodoxy and future defender of Novgorodian territorial integrity.
This raises the question whether the Testament of King Magnus, if it were not from the start intended as a hagiographical text, then at least assumed this function.
This text is based on sources and arguments I have advanced in the following publications.
The Polna Rivers and Russia’s Medieval Borders with the Scandinavian West, Traditions and Innovations. Papers presented to Andreas Haarder (PEO: Pre-publications of the English Department of Odense University, Special Issue, June 1994), Odense 1994, 155-70.
The Russian Testament of King Magnus Eriksson — a Hagiographic Text ? Medieval Spirituality in Scandinavia and Europe. A Collection of Essays in Honor of Tore Nyberg, Edited by Lars Bisgaard Carsten Selch Jensen, Kurt Villads Jensen and John Lind, Odense 2000, 195-212.
Consequences of the Baltic Crusades in Target Areas. The Case of Karelia, publ. in Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150-1500, ed. Alan V. Murray (Ashgate), 2001, 133-49.
Religiozno-polititcheskie predposylki “ Rukopisanija korolja svejskogo Magnusha po švedskim i russkim istochnikam ”, in Drevnejshie gosudarstva Vostochnoj Evropy 2000, Moskva 2001, forthcoming.
Résumés
J. LIND (Université du Danemark du Sud, Odense)
A Swedish Crusader King as Russian Orthodox Saint on the Valamo Archipelago ?
L'article étudie sous ses différents aspects le Testament de Magnus, roi de Suède, apocryphe russe de la fin du XIVe siècle ou du début du XVe, composé probablement par un moine du monastère de Valaam, et qui se présente comme la relation, rédigée par le roi Magnus lui-même, de sa désastreuse croisade contre Novgorod entreprise en 1347. Dans cette pseudo-autobiographie, le roi de Suède, déchu, miraculeusement sauvé de son naufrage au large de la Norvège, parvient à gagner le monastère du Saint-Sauveur, sur la rivière Polna, embrasse la foi orthodoxe et, avant de s'éteindre, prend l'habit sous le nom de Grégoire.