The Mongol Conquest of the Rus
The Mongols came in winter on purpose. Rus was a country of forest, marsh and river, almost impassable to cavalry for most of the year, and the frozen rivers turned it into a road network aimed at every town that mattered. Batu Khan crossed the Volga in 1236 with an army the chronicles put in the hundreds of thousands and modern estimates closer to forty or fifty thousand, and Subutai, the best general the empire produced, did the planning. Ryazan was reached in December 1237, refused a tribute of one tenth of everything, and fell after five days. Vladimir followed in February 1238, its grand prince killed at the Sit river with his army. The campaign paused for the spring thaw and resumed in 1239, and Kiev - the mother of Russian cities, already declining but still the largest place in the eastern Slavic world - was stormed in December 1240 after its walls were broken by catapults. Six years later a papal envoy riding through counted some two hundred houses standing and fields of skulls and bones. The decisive failure was political rather than military: the Rus principalities had spent a century fighting each other over the Kievan succession and did not combine, so an army that could probably not have beaten them together beat them separately. Novgorod escaped only because the thaw came before the Mongols reached it. What followed was not occupation. The Horde settled on the lower Volga at Sarai, left the princes on their thrones, and required tribute, census returns and personal attendance to receive the patent to rule - an arrangement that made the Russian princes into tax farmers and made the one who collected best into the ruler of Russia.
- Year: 1237 CE
- Category: Military
