Odoyevsky family


The House of Odoyev was a princely Rurikid family descended from the sovereign Princes / Dukes of Odoyev and Novosil. Their ancestors were the Upper Oka sovereigns who ruled the tiny Principality of Odoyev until 1494. In the following decade the family was absorbed into the ranks of Muscovite boyars. The Odoyevsky family died out in the mid-19th century. The family was listed in the 5th part of the dvoryanstvo registers of the Moscow and Vladimir regions.

History

The princely House of Odoyev dates from 1376, when Prince :ru:Роман Семёнович |Roman Semyonovich of Novosil moved his seat from Novosil to Odoyev after Mamai's Tatars destroyed the town of Novosil in 1375. According to the Velvet Book, the family traced their lineage from Prince Michael of Chernigov, Grand Duke of Kiev and Chernigov, a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Up until the late 1400s, the House of Novosil and Odoyev played off Moscow against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Golden Horde. Through the 15th century, the House of Odoyev concluded many treaties with Lithuania under the condition of internal autonomy and independence in their politics towards Moscow and Ryazan.
The first appanage prince of Odoyev was :ru:Юрий Романович Чёрный|Yuriy Romanovich Odoyevsky, nicknamed "the Black". In 1494 he submitted to Duke Ivan III of Moscow and the Princes of Odoyev became vassal "serving princes" at the Moscow court. In the late 1500s, the Odoyevsky princes finally lost their principality to Ivan the Terrible and entered the regular boyar aristocracy.
In the 16th and 17th centuries the Odoyevsky family served at the Moscow court as boyars and voivodes. The house produced 13 boyars. The voivodes from the Odoyevsky family participated in many battles of the 16th century, and were especially notable in the battles with the Tatars and in the 1552 Kazanian Campaign of Ivan the Terrible. Prince Nikita Romanovich Odoevsky entered the Oprichnina of 1565–1572. As a boyar and a member of the Oprichnina, he served as a leader in many battles. He was the voivode at the Battle of Molodi, fighting against the Crimean Khan Devlet I Giray. He headed the troops in the 1572 battle with the Cherimisy after their uprising in the. In 1573, soon after he was appointed the voivode on the Oka, he suddenly fell from grace, was captured and tortured to death. His grandson, Prince , served as namestnik in Astrakhan and in Vladimir, ran the Prikaz of Siberia and the Prikaz of the Kazanian palace. He supervised the making of the Code of 1649, was the head of the Grand Treasury and the Ministries of the Reiter and Foreign Regiments. In 1682 he signed the decree annulling the mestnichestvo.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the Odoyevsky family formed part of the highest aristocracy. However, despite their illustrious background, the members of the family occupied relatively mediocre ranks and offices, becoming as colonels, ministerial officials and junior generals, while many family members held regular junior officers' ranks. Prince Alexander Ivanovich Odoyevsky, a cornet in the Imperial guards, was a member of the and took part in the Revolt of 1825. He was sentenced to katorga, but in 1837 he was trasferred to the Cacasus with the rank of private. The last member of the Odoyevsky family, Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoyevsky was a writer, philosopher and a musical critic; he served as an employee at a series of institutions; from 1846 he was the assistant to the head of the Russian Imperial Public Library and the curator of the Rumyantsev Museum. In 1861 he was appointed a Senator. He died childless.
In 1878 the Emperor Alexander II allowed staff-rotmister of the Imperial guards, Nikolay Maslov, the son of Sofia Ivanovna Odoyevskaya, to name himself Odoyevsky-Maslov, and to merge his own coat-of-arms with that of his mother's family to pass it down to his senior male descendants. Later became a General of the Cavalry and the appointed ataman of the Don Cossack troops; however, he also died childless.

Notable members

, the last male descendant of the family