The Battle on the Ice — Lake Peipus
Russia was attacked from both directions in the same decade. While the Mongols were destroying the principalities of the north-east, the Teutonic Knights and their Livonian branch were pushing east from the Baltic with papal authorisation to convert the pagan Baltic peoples - and, increasingly, to bring schismatic Orthodox Russians under Rome. They took Pskov in 1241 with help from a faction inside it, built a fort at Koporye, and raided to within twenty miles of Novgorod. Novgorod had expelled Alexander after his victory over the Swedes on the Neva and now asked him back. He retook Koporye and Pskov, then met the Livonian force on the ice at the eastern shore of Lake Peipus on 5 April 1242. The knights charged in the wedge formation the Baltic crusades were built around, and Alexander had arranged for it: his centre was infantry and archers who absorbed and slowed the charge on broken ground near the shore, while his cavalry closed on both flanks. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, written by the losing side, records twenty brothers of the order killed and six taken - a serious loss for an order that fielded knights in the dozens, though the Russian chronicles multiply it. The ice breaking under the weight of armoured men is not in the earliest accounts at all; it enters later and was made permanent by Eisenstein's film in 1938. The eastward push stopped, and the Orthodox-Catholic border in that region has changed remarkably little since. The order had been expanding east for forty years and had absorbed the remnants of the Sword Brothers after their destruction in Lithuania in 1236, so the force at Peipus was small and its loss disproportionate. Novgorod's own position was peculiar: it had escaped the Mongols entirely and was the richest Russian city, but its militia was townsmen rather than professionals and it hired its princes. The treaty that followed returned Pskov and fixed a frontier that held. Alexander then spent the rest of his life managing the other threat, travelling twice to the Horde and once to Karakorum.
- Year: 1242 CE
- Category: Military
