Authors

Discussion

Archaeological and architectural evidence suggests that churches in Novgorod were not structures with purely eccleasiastical and religious functions and importance, but that they had secular and commercial functions too. The commercial roles of some churches in Novgorod, such as the Church of Saint John on Opoki on Novgorod’s Trade Side led by a brotherhood of wax merchants, three boyars, and the Novgorod tysyatski (chiliarch), are known in academic literature. Mikhail Tikhomirov, for example, remarks that some of Novgorod’s churches had added purpose-built “storage” rooms to store valuables (The Towns of Ancient Rus’, 127). However, the potential commercial functions of the many small churches (sometimes called “domestic” churches after their descriptions in contemporary texts as церковницы and божницы) dotting the medieval urban landscape has gone unexplored.

According to the local Novgorod chronicles––namely the First, Third, and Fourth Novgorod Chronicles––many of these churches were funded by boyar (noble) patrons and also by wealthy merchants in the later Middle Ages. This paper seeks to address the gap in scholarship by examining the archaeological footprint and architecture of these churches in conjunction with secular and ecclesiastical texts to investigate their commercial functions.

Not only does examining the topographical built landscape of Novgorod aid our understanding of the city’s medieval layout, but it contibutes to our scholarly conception of boyar power, especially economic, and the multifaceted motives for their patronage of small churches––both religious and secular to speak in broad terms. In doing so, this paper proposes that in medieval Novgorod, churches were spaces that blurred the line between “secular” and “religious” and that such a binary is unhelpful for scholars seeking to grasp the cultural, social, and economic milieu of life and the consolidation of local magnate and trade powers in medieval Novgorod.