Introduction

As he lay dying of the Plague, Grand Prince Simeon Ivanovich of Moscow (b.1316, r.1340–1353) was thinking about the future. He was the third member of his branch of the Rjurikovich dynasty to rule as grand prince of Vladimir – the highest sovereign title in what we today call Russia – having followed his father (Ivan I Kalita, d.1340) and uncle (Iurii Daniilovich, d.1325), with some interruptions, onto that throne. He fretted that he would be the last of his line, having watched his two sons and direct heirs, Ivan and Simeon, die of the same deadly disease that was about to shorten his own life. All that stood between him and the extinction of his branch of the family, the Daniilovichi, were his two younger brothers and their young sons – slender threads of hope in times of rampant pestilence. Simeon naturally enough turned at that moment of bracing reality to the writing of his will, in which he laid out all his bequests and made provisions for his widow. Towards the end of the text, in a unique and affecting passage, he wrote, ‘And lo, I write this to you so that the memory of our parents and of us may not die, and so that the candle may not go out.’ ¹ Here, Grand Prince Simeon looks back to his parents, to the family to which he belonged, and forward to the ruling house that needed to continue, even if not in his direct line. Here we see an awareness that, as the Muscovite historian Edward Keenan put it, ‘in the culture of the Muscovite court there was simply no responsibility of the monarch more important than the generation of viable male issue’. ²