Novgorod First Chronicle
Based on Wikipedia: Novgorod First Chronicle
A Window Into Medieval Russia's Frozen North
Somewhere in the middle of a sentence about a brutal civil war, the oldest surviving chronicle of medieval Russia begins. The first pages are gone—lost to time, fire, or the simple decay of parchment over eight centuries. What remains starts abruptly in 1016, mid-thought, as two brothers fought for control of Kiev.
This is the Novgorod First Chronicle, and its damaged beginning feels oddly appropriate. History rarely offers clean starting points.
The chronicle emerged from Novgorod, a city that dominated the fur trade routes connecting Scandinavia to the Byzantine Empire. While most medieval Russian chronicles were written in the southern cities of Kiev or Vladimir, the Novgorod First Chronicle captures something different: the perspective of a northern mercantile republic, fiercely independent, more interested in recording the price of grain and the election of local officials than in glorifying princes.
The Oldest Manuscript
The earliest surviving copy is called the Synod Scroll, written on parchment during the second half of the thirteenth century. To appreciate how remarkable this is, consider that the more famous Primary Chronicle—the foundational text of Russian history—survives only in copies made almost a century later. The Synod Scroll predates them all.
It sits today in Moscow's State Historical Museum, first published for scholars in 1841. The parchment bears the handwriting of multiple scribes across different eras. Paleographers—scholars who study ancient handwriting—can identify where one scribe stopped and another began, sometimes decades apart.
The entry describing the famous Battle of Lake Peipus, for instance, was written roughly a hundred years after the battle itself occurred. In 1242, Prince Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic Knights on the frozen lake, a victory that would be immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film. But the chronicle entry recording it was added in the mid-fourteenth century, when monks at the Yuriev Monastery continued the Synod Scroll where earlier scribes had stopped.
What Makes It Different
Medieval chronicles were not neutral records. They served political purposes, justified dynastic claims, and promoted particular interpretations of history. The Novgorod First Chronicle differs from its southern counterparts in ways that reveal the distinct character of the Novgorod Republic.
The most striking difference involves a figure named Rurik.
According to later tradition, Rurik was a Varangian—a Viking—who arrived in 862 and founded the ruling dynasty that would govern Russian lands for over seven centuries. The Rurikid dynasty produced Ivan the Terrible and ended only in 1598. Every legitimate prince claimed descent from this legendary founder.
Or so one version of history claims.
In the mid-fifteenth century version of the Novgorod First Chronicle, genealogies and regnal lists begin with Rurik. But examine the Hypatian Codex, compiled around 1425 in the south, and you find something puzzling: the list of Kievan princes starts with Dir and Askold, continues to Oleg, then Igor—and never mentions Rurik at all. The Laurentian Codex from 1377 similarly begins its regnal list from the year Oleg took up residence in Kiev, with no reference to Rurik.
These discrepancies have sparked scholarly debate for generations. Was Rurik a later invention, retroactively inserted to create a unified origin story? Or did different regional traditions simply emphasize different founding figures? The chronicles themselves cannot settle the question—they are evidence of how medieval Russians understood their past, not necessarily what actually happened.
The Voice of a Republic
Novgorod was unusual in medieval Europe. While most of the continent organized itself around hereditary monarchies and feudal hierarchies, Novgorod developed something closer to a mercantile republic. The city elected its own officials: the posadnik (roughly a mayor) and the tysyatsky (a military commander and commercial arbitrator). Princes served at the invitation of the city assembly and could be expelled if they displeased it.
This political structure shapes the chronicle's content. Where southern chronicles focus on princely succession and dynastic legitimacy, the Novgorod First Chronicle records local elections, the construction of churches and monasteries, epidemics, and the price of food.
The entries lack literary embellishment. Southern chronicles often employ elaborate rhetorical flourishes, drawing on Byzantine literary models. The Novgorod chronicle writes in plain local dialect, recording facts without ornamentation. When famine struck, the chronicler noted that people ate lime leaves and birchbark, ground wood pulp mixed with husks and straw. The passage reads like an accountant's ledger of suffering.
The Magi of 1071
Among the chronicle's most fascinating entries is an account from 1071 involving volkhvs—a word sometimes translated as "magi" or "sorcerers." These figures appear periodically in early Russian chronicles as leaders of popular uprisings, representatives of the old pagan traditions resisting Christianization.
That year, two volkhvs arrived in Novgorod and began stirring unrest. They prophesied that soon the Dnieper River would flow backwards and the very land would move from place to place. A local commander named Yan Vyshatich confronted them and asked a simple question: how do you think humans came to be?
Their answer was startling:
God bathed in the bathhouse and sweated, wiped himself with a rag and threw it from heaven to the earth; and the devil created man, and God put his soul into him. Therefore, when a person dies, the body goes to the earth, and the soul goes to God.
This creation myth is neither pure paganism nor orthodox Christianity. It represents something historians find throughout medieval Europe: a synthesis of old and new beliefs, folk religion absorbing Christian elements while retaining older structures.
The Soviet historian Igor Froyanov recognized something remarkable in this passage. The story closely resembles a creation myth of the Mordovian-Finns, a people living east of the Slavic heartland. In their tradition, the supreme god Cham-Pas and the devil Shaitana cooperate to create humanity, with similar motifs about bathhouses and towels and the division of body and soul between competing divine powers.
If the volkhvs were of Finnic origin—and linguistic and cultural evidence suggests many practitioners of folk religion in the north were—then the chronicle preserves a trace of beliefs that would otherwise be lost entirely. These weren't ancient pagans stubbornly resisting Christianity. They were people living in a mixed religious landscape, drawing on multiple traditions to explain the world.
The Problem of Sources
Historians face a puzzle with medieval chronicles: which texts came first, and which borrowed from which?
The Novgorod First Chronicle exists in two major versions. The "Older Edition" is the damaged Synod Scroll beginning in 1016. The "Younger Redaction" includes later fifteenth-century copies that start earlier, from 854, and continue to 1447. These later copies fill in the missing beginning of the Synod Scroll.
But where did that information come from?
A Soviet researcher named Oleg Viktorovich argued in 1987 that the later Novgorod chronicle reflected an even older lost source—a "Primary Kievan Code" from the late eleventh century that contained information not found in the Primary Chronicle. This would make the Novgorod tradition independently valuable for reconstructing early Russian history.
Ukrainian historian Tetyana Vilkul challenged this view in her 2015 doctoral dissertation. She demonstrated that the "Younger Redaction" of the Novgorod chronicle shows contamination from the Primary Chronicle—phrases and passages borrowed from the southern text. The information filling in those missing early years wasn't independently preserved tradition; it was copied from other sources, sometimes centuries later.
This matters because it affects how historians can use the chronicles as evidence. If the Novgorod chronicle preserves independent early traditions, it offers a check on the Primary Chronicle's version of events. If it merely borrowed from the Primary Chronicle and later compilations, it tells us less about what actually happened and more about how fifteenth-century monks assembled historical narratives from available materials.
Legitimacy and the Throne
Medieval Russian chronicles followed strict formulas when recording royal succession. A prince's right to rule depended on demonstrating that his father—or grandfather, or sometimes brother or uncle—had sat on the same throne before him. Anyone whose male relatives had not held that specific throne was considered izgoi: ineligible to rule, an outcast from legitimate succession.
This formula appears throughout the Novgorod First Chronicle, just as it does in the Primary Chronicle and the Kievan Chronicle. The repetition reveals how medieval Russians conceived of political legitimacy. Ruling wasn't a matter of conquest or competence but of bloodline and precedent. Each reign had to connect to previous reigns through documented family relationships.
The formula also explains why genealogies mattered so much, and why chroniclers might adjust them. A prince whose legitimacy was questioned needed his family tree recorded properly. A chronicler serving that prince might ensure the record supported the right conclusions.
The Chronicle's Afterlife
The Novgorod First Chronicle didn't remain a single document. Its text was copied, excerpted, and incorporated into later compilations. A fifteenth-century work called the Novgorodsko-Sofiysky Svod—the Novgorod-Sofia Compilation—drew heavily on it. That compilation in turn became a source for the Novgorod Fourth Chronicle and the Sofia First Chronicle.
Through these channels, information from the Novgorod First Chronicle spread into the all-Russian chronicles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It also influenced the Tver chronicle, produced in a rival principality. The text was too valuable to ignore, even for chroniclers serving competing political interests.
Different copies took different paths through history. The Academic copy passed through the hands of Vasily Tatishchev, an eighteenth-century historian who pioneered the critical study of Russian chronicles. In 1737, it entered the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, where it remains today with the unremarkable registration number 17.8.36.
Why It Matters
The Novgorod First Chronicle matters because it represents a road not taken in Russian history.
Novgorod's republic eventually fell. In 1478, Ivan the Third of Moscow conquered the city, removed its famous veche bell—the symbol of its popular assembly—and ended centuries of self-governance. The chronicle tradition continued for a time, but Novgorod became a provincial city, subordinate to Moscow's centralizing monarchy.
Before that conquest, though, Novgorod represented an alternative model: a society where merchants and assemblies held power, where princes served rather than ruled absolutely, where the concerns of ordinary urban life—food prices, building projects, local elections—mattered enough to record. The chronicle captures that world in its plain-spoken entries, its lack of rhetorical embellishment, its focus on what actually happened in one northern city across five centuries.
When later generations wanted to understand medieval Russia, they often turned to the more literary southern chronicles with their dramatic narratives and theological sophistication. The Novgorod First Chronicle offered something different: the view from the frozen north, written by monks who recorded grain prices alongside battles, who cared about their city's autonomy, and who preserved, almost accidentally, traces of beliefs and traditions that would otherwise have vanished entirely.
The missing pages at the beginning remind us how much has been lost. The surviving pages remind us how much, against all odds, remains.