The life of St Maximus of Kiev
When fresh fighting broke out between rival factions within the Golden Horde, Maximus judged it wiser to move, withdrawing his own seat first to Bryansk and then to Suzdal, before finally, in 1299, transferring the metropolitan cathedra outright to Vladimir on the river Klyazma. He was the last man to hold that office while actually residing in Kiev itself.
The move did not erase the old capital's name from the title: for generations afterward, the metropolitans of the Russian Church continued to be styled Metropolitan of Kiev and Vladimir both, a formal thread back to the city Maximus himself had left, unbroken until the Russian Church's own independent standing began under Metropolitan Jonah in 1448.
Maximus governed from Vladimir until his death on December 6, 1305, having led the Church through more than twenty years of one of the most unsettled periods Rus had yet endured.
