Novgorod Republic

The Novgorod Republic was the Russian city-state from 1136 to 1478, Lord Novgorod the Great, ruling the forests from the Baltic to the Urals. In 1136 the townsmen expelled Prince Vsevolod for cowardice and kept the veche bell: henceforth princes were hired to fight and dismissed at will, while posadniks and thousandmen, great boyar merchants all, governed with the archbishop. Novgorod grew fat where others starved: furs, wax and honey flowed down to the Hanseatic Kontor, and German cloth and salt flowed back, making the republic the middleman of the north. Its prince Alexander, still a youth, smashed the Swedes on the Neva in 1240 and the Teutonic knights on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242, earning the name Nevsky and giving Russia its favourite saint. The republic balanced Moscow against Lithuania for two centuries, but Martha the Mayoress bet wrong: Ivan III beat Novgorod at Shelon in 1471, and in 1478 he entered the city, packed the veche bell to Moscow, and ended the only Russian republic of the Middle Ages. Its chronicles, birch bark letters and onion domes outlived its liberty by centuries.