Izyaslav of Vladimir

Saint Izyaslav of Vladimir, right-⁠believing prince, was the eldest son of the right-⁠believing Saint Andrei Bogolyubsky, Grand Prince of Vladimir, and the brother of Princes Mstislav and Gleb. He lived in the twelfth century in the land of Rostov and Suzdal and died young, in 1165. The Russian Church honours him in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir.

The year of his birth is unknown, and the sources do not even agree on the name of his mother. The chronicles begin to mention him after his father became ruler of the land of Rostov and Suzdal. In the winter of 1159-1160 Andrei sent him at the head of the Rostov army, reinforced with help from Murom, to relieve Prince Sviatoslav Vladimirovich of Vshchizh, who was besieged by the princes of Chernigov and Polotsk. When they heard that Izyaslav's army was approaching, the besiegers lifted the siege and made peace.

In 1164, together with his father, his uncle Yaroslav and Prince Yuri of Murom, he took part in the victorious campaign against the Volga Bulgars. The Russian army took the town of Bryakhimov and three other strongholds. The princes and their men attributed the victory to the protection of the Mother of God through her Vladimir icon, which they had carried with them. The account of this miracle, with the names of the princes, entered the oldest redaction of the Tale of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God.

Soon after the campaign Izyaslav reposed in the Lord, unmarried and without children. He was buried on 28 October 1165 in the cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, in the presence of his father and his brother Mstislav. In his memory Andrei Bogolyubsky ordered the church of the Protection of the Mother of God on the Nerl to be built that same year.

His name was entered in the diptychs of the eparchies of Rostov and Suzdal and of the cathedrals of Vladimir. The inscription over his tomb, known from a copy of 1670, calls him a gentle, wise and brave prince and mentions the great iron arrows he had made, which were kept in the cathedral and regarded as precious relics.

In February 1919 his relics, together with those of other saints of Vladimir, were opened and removed from the cathedral. They were returned to the Church in the 1950s and rest today in the Dormition cathedral of Vladimir. His glorification came about through the inclusion of his name in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir, established in 1982.