The Great Stand on the Ugra
Ivan III had stopped sending tribute. Akhmat, khan of the Great Horde - the rump left after the Crimean, Kazan and Astrakhan khanates broke away - came in 1480 to enforce it, with an agreement that Casimir of Poland-Lithuania would attack Moscow from the west at the same time. The armies met on the Ugra river in October. The Russians held the fords with firearms and crossbows and beat off several attempts to cross; then both sides stopped and waited. Ivan's position was not comfortable - his own brothers had rebelled, the Moscow boyars were divided, and he withdrew from the front to Moscow, where the city and Archbishop Vassian publicly accused him of cowardice and told him to fight. Casimir never came, because the Crimean khan, Ivan's ally, attacked Lithuania instead. In early November the river began to freeze, which would have opened it along its whole length; both armies withdrew within days of each other, the Russians deliberately and the Horde in what looks like a loss of nerve. Akhmat went back to the steppe and was killed by a rival the following January. Nothing decisive happened, and the tribute was never paid again. Russian tradition dates the end of the yoke from this non-event, and the date is as good as any: the Great Horde was destroyed by the Crimeans in 1502. Archbishop Vassian's letter to Ivan, telling a grand prince to his face that he was behaving like a runaway and reminding him what Dmitry had done at the Don, is one of the sharpest documents in medieval Russian politics. Ivan's caution had reasons: he had been fighting his own brothers that summer and had to buy them off before he could face the Horde at all. The Russians used hand firearms along the fords, which was still novel. Both armies withdrawing within days of each other gave rise to a chronicle tradition that God had frightened the Tatars away.
- Year: 1480 CE
- Category: Military
