Gleb of Smolensk

Holy Right-⁠Believing Gleb of Smolensk (about 1355-1399), called in the sources Gleb Svyatoslavich and in the icon tradition Gleb Vsevolodovich, was a prince of Smolensk and died in battle in 1399.

He appears in the sources from 1386, when he took part, with his father, Prince Svyatoslav Ivanovich of Smolensk, and his cousin Ivan Vasilievich, in an unfortunate expedition to recover the city of Mstislavl. On 29 April 1386, in the decisive battle on the Vekhra River before the walls of the city, Svyatoslav and Ivan were killed, and Gleb and his brother George were seriously wounded and taken prisoner. In May 1386 the Lithuanians placed George on the throne of Smolensk, and Gleb was taken as a hostage to Lithuania.

In keeping with the peace of September 1386, in 1390 Gleb sided with Vladislav (Jogaila) and Ivan Skirgaila against Vytautas, who was fighting for the throne of the grand prince of Lithuania. In the fighting on the Vilia River, near the village of Veikuliskes, close to Vilnius, he was taken prisoner by Vytautas, who in 1392 or 1393 gave him the throne of Smolensk, releasing him for the purpose, and moved his brother George to Roslavl. In 1395 the struggle among the sons of Svyatoslav grew sharper over the division of the holdings in the part of Smolensk outside Lithuanian rule. In September Vytautas, declaring himself a mediator, seized the princes in his tent outside the city, where they had come for talks, and occupied Smolensk. The western Russian chronicles, which in part justify Vytautas, say that Gleb had begun to disobey, and that this is why he was deprived of Smolensk.

Gleb took no part in his brother George's struggle to regain Smolensk, apparently satisfied with the grant he had from Vytautas, the town of Polonnoe, on the border between the Kiev land and Volhynia. He went with Vytautas on the campaign against the Horde to restore Khan Tokhtamysh. On 12 August 1399, on the Vorskla River, the armies of Khan Timur-⁠Kutlug and the emir Edigei crushed the host of Vytautas and his allies, and Gleb fell in the battle.

Veneration

In 1431 his wife, Princess Juliana (in monastic life Helen), gave a Psalter to a church in Smolensk in his memory. His name was not put in the list of the grand princes of Smolensk drawn up in Moscow in the sixteenth century for perpetual commemoration, but in the second half of the seventeenth century the names of the princes who fell on the Vorskla, including his, were taken from the chronicles and written in the synodikon of the Kyiv Caves Lavra. A prince of Smolensk, Gleb Vsevolodovich, whose relics rest in the cathedral of Smolensk, is mentioned in the Description of Russian Saints, and in old icon painters' manuals his commemoration is on 7 July. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, scholars (Leonid Kavelin, Sergius Spassky, Demetrius Sambikin) identified this Gleb Vsevolodovich, no prince of Smolensk with that patronymic being known, with Gleb Svyatoslavich. His canonisation is confirmed by the inclusion of his name in the Synaxis of the Saints of Smolensk, whose feast was established in 1984 with the blessing of Archbishop Theodosius (Protsyuk) of Smolensk and Vyazma. His burial place in the Dormition cathedral at Smolensk is unknown.

In the model icon manuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries he is described with curly hair and a beard of medium length, in a prince's coat and cap, holding a cross in his right hand and a sheathed sword in his left. Images of him appear in Pomor icons of the Synaxis of Russian Saints, in the group of the right-⁠believing princes.