Benjamin Gray

Project title: ‘The Buried People’: Accessing Empire through the texts of Medieval Novgorod

Project Summary: 

My project focuses on the taiga forest empire of the Novgorod Republic and the Finno-Ugrian peoples who lived under its rule. The fur trading city-state of Novgorod the Great dominated an area stretching from parts of modern day Finland to Khanty-Mansia, beyond the Ural Mountains, spanning the vast river-lands of Perm and Zavolochia (‘beyond the portage’) and extending north into the Arctic Circle. The study will examine the regional differences in the experiences of the indigenous populations of this region and how Novgorod interacted with them, exploring its methods of control and operation of empire and aiming to expand the existing body of scholarship on this key aspect of the history of Russia. The project will work with the various available written sources, including chronicle records and birchbark letters, as well as oral tradition, in tandem with one another, showing ways in which one form of source material can compliment and help to explain the account of another. This is particularly necessary as the key source, the Rus’ chronicles, can be laconic and mysterious, leaving many questions to be asked.