The Battle of Kulikovo
By 1380 the Horde had spent twenty years destroying itself. The Russians called it the great troubling: more than twenty khans in as many years, and real power in the west held by Mamai, a commander who was not descended from Genghis Khan and therefore could not take the throne, ruling instead through puppets. Moscow had stopped paying and had beaten one of his forces at the Vozha in 1378. Mamai assembled a large army, hired Genoese infantry from the Crimean ports, and arranged for the Lithuanians and the prince of Ryazan to join him. Dmitry's decision was to move first and fight before they could combine, crossing the Don on the night of 7 September - which put a river behind his army and removed the option of retreat, and which gave him his name. The battle on the field of Kulikovo the next day was long and nearly lost; the Russian left was driven in, and it was an ambush regiment held in the oak woods under Vladimir of Serpukhov and Dmitry Bobrok, released late into the exposed flank, that broke the Horde line. Sergius of Radonezh had blessed the campaign and sent two monks with the army, which turned a dispute over tribute into a war of faith and did more for the memory of the battle than the outcome did. Numbers are unrecoverable: the chronicles say hundreds of thousands, modern estimates run from twenty to forty thousand a side. The Russian force was drawn from Moscow, Serpukhov, Rostov and a dozen smaller principalities, and the coalition itself was new; the prince of Ryazan stayed out and the Novgorodians did not come. Dmitry fought in the ranks in the armour of an ordinary retainer, having given his own to a boyar who was killed wearing it, and was found after the battle unconscious under a felled tree. The losses were heavy enough that Moscow could not follow up. Contemporary Horde sources barely mention the engagement, which is itself evidence about how it looked from Sarai: one more defeat for a usurper in a decade of them.
- Year: 1380 CE
- Category: Military
