Mstislav Andreevich of Vladimir

The right-⁠believing Prince Mstislav Andreevich (before 1160-1173) was prince of Vladimir, the second son of Grand Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky. He died on 28 March 1173 and is numbered among the saints in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Russian Land, with commemoration on the second Sunday after Pentecost.

He was the second son from the first marriage of the right-⁠believing Grand Prince Andrei Yuryevich Bogolyubsky of Rostov and Suzdal, younger brother of Prince Izyaslav Andreevich, elder brother of Prince Gleb Andreevich and of the future king of Georgia, Prince Yuri (George) Andreevich. The sources are the chronicles, hagiographic writings and synodikons. After the death of his elder brother Izyaslav, buried on 28 October 1165 in the Dormition Cathedral of Vladimir, at which Mstislav took part, he became Andrei Bogolyubsky's heir.

At the beginning of 1169, by his father's order, he led a great expedition to the middle Dnieper, with the armies of a coalition of eleven Russian princes, against Prince Mstislav Izyaslavich of Kyiv. On 8 March 1169, after a three-⁠day assault, his troops took Kyiv. The city was plundered for two days by the allied armies; nearly all the monasteries of Kyiv suffered, except the Caves, and the great sanctuaries, the Saint Sophia Cathedral and the Tithe church. On 12 March 1169, leaving his uncle, Prince Gleb Yuryevich of Pereyaslavl, on the throne of Kyiv, he set out with the armies of Rostov and Suzdal for North-⁠East Rus. On 8 May 1169 he may have witnessed the deposition from an unlawfully assumed rank of Theodore, elected metropolitan of Vladimir by Andrei Bogolyubsky's will but not recognised in Kyiv and Constantinople.

In the winter of 1169-1170, by his father's order, he led a new expedition of the coalition of Russian princes against Novgorod. He ravaged the rural surroundings of the city, but after a four-⁠day assault the strongly fortified town was not taken; after notable losses Mstislav lifted the siege and withdrew. The late Novgorod tradition of the "Tale of the Sign of the Mother of God" presented the event as a great defeat, wrongly naming Prince Roman as the son of the ruler of North-⁠East Rus. In 1170, by blockading Novgorod's trade and supplies, Andrei Bogolyubsky regained control of the city and reduced the military defeat. In the winter of 1172-1173 Mstislav led, from Gorodets, the army of North-⁠East Rus against Volga Bulgaria. He took only one town and six villages, and the enemy sent against him an army of six thousand men. He had to retreat quickly, with the prisoners, but avoided disaster and brought his army to the borders of Rus. Contemporaries counted the escape as help from the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God.

He died on 28 March 1173 and was buried in the Dormition Cathedral of Vladimir. The sources preserve no news of his marriage; in some genealogies he appears childless, but the chronicles mention the birth of a son, Vasily, in the summer of 1171. Until the mid-⁠sixteenth century his memory was tied only to his belonging to the ruling dynasty. He was commemorated at memorial services in the synodikons of the Vladimir cathedral and of other monasteries; Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible ordered, after the conquest of Kazan in 1552, a series of memorial services for the princes of Vladimir, among them Mstislav, hoping for the help of the saints of the Russian land.