ABSTRACT
Novgorod the Great was arguably the greatest city of medieval Rus’, the eastern Slavic polity that arose in the ninth century and out of which Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were later formed. With the decline of Kiev following the Mongol sack of that city on 8 December 1240, Novgorod was the largest and wealthiest city in eastern Europe and the centre of Russian culture and art; it remained so until eclipsed by Moscow in the fifteenth century.1 Novgorod made its wealth from the fur trade, capturing squirrels and more luxurious furs (ermine, sables, marmots and foxes) in the Novgorodian Land that stretched north and east of the city to the White Sea and beyond to the Ural Mountains, and trading bundles of these furs with German merchants in Novgorod itself. These merchants shipped them north up the River Volkhov, along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, down the Neva into the Gulf of Finland and into the Baltic Sea and the Hanseatic cities of the northern Holy Roman Empire.2
