James of Rostov

Saint James was bishop of Rostov, who died on 27 November 1392, and founded the Conception monastery (now Spaso-⁠Yakovlevsky) on the shore of Lake Nero. He was numbered among the saints, as a hierarch, in 1549, by the second Makaryev Council. He is remembered on 27 November, with a great service.

The bishop

In youth he received monastic tonsure at the Kopyr monastery on the river Ukhtoma and became abbot there. In 1386 he was consecrated bishop of Rostov. In 1389 he was driven out of his see. The cause was the boyars' displeasure at his decision to pardon a woman condemned to death and to send her to repentance in a monastery. According to the Serbian source, a woman caught in sin had been condemned to death by the prince and boyars of Rostov. In her need, she ran to the feet of James, begging him to save her from death. Saint James took pity on her and did not hand her over to have the death penalty carried out, but appointed for her a special place of repentance until the end of her life. This angered the prince of Rostov and the people, who drove the bishop out.

Leaving Rostov, James settled on the shore of Lake Nero, where he founded the Conception monastery (now Spaso-⁠Yakovlevsky). According to the Serbian source, leaving the city, he came to the shore of Lake Rostov, took off his hierarch's mantle, laid it on the water, crossed himself, stood on it and set out on the lake. After crossing about two kilometres, he came ashore at the place where the Yakovlevsky monastery now stands, built a hut there and lived in it. In time he gathered there a brotherhood of monks and raised cells and a church in the name of the Conception of Saint Anne. He died on 27 November 1392 and was buried in the church of the Conception of the Most Holy Mother of God of the monastery he had founded, which, in honour of him, is called Yakovlevsky. In the Yakovlevsky church there is a tomb complex over the saint's relics.

About his life and the dates

Later lives tell that James fought the iconoclast heresy of a certain Marcian, who appeared at Rostov at the end of the fourteenth century. This story arose because the ancient life of the saint, composed not later than the middle of the sixteenth century, has not been preserved (Dimitry of Rostov did not know it either when he composed the Menaion-⁠Readings). The hagiographers used, for his life, fragments of the saint's service, made up of borrowings from the service of Saint Bucolus (died about the year 100, remembered on 6 February), who fought the heretic Marcian of the first century, and from the service of Saint Stephen of Surozh (eighth century, remembered on 15 December), who opposed the iconoclast emperor Constantine Copronymus.

Although the years of James's episcopate have been fixed in hagiography between 1386 and 1390, they raise doubts. First, James could not have been consecrated in 1386, because at that time there was no metropolitan: Pimen, the canonical head of the Russian Church, was in Constantinople, to answer a patriarchal judgement, having left Moscow on 9 May 1385. Cyprian, who contested Pimen's right to the throne of the metropolis of Russia, was also then in Constantinople. Moreover, in 1387, to the see of Rostov, which from then became an archbishopric, the abbot of the Simonov monastery, Theodore, was appointed, during the flight of Pimen and Theodore from Constantinople, on the road to Russia. In other words, the see was vacant in 1387. Either James was driven out before then, or was consecrated later. On the other hand, Theodore too was deprived of the see, which could have happened only between 1387 and 1389.