Rus’ Under the Mongol Shadow

Between 1237 and 1240 the Mongol armies of Batu Khan overran the principalities of Rus’, sacking Ryazan, Vladimir, and Kiev, killing the grand prince of Vladimir at the Sit’ River, and binding the surviving lands into the tribute orbit of the newly founded Golden Horde. Novgorod the Great, by an accident of geography and the spring thaw, escaped the sack — and it is on this stage, of a shattered and subjugated Rus’ with one great northern city still standing, that the career of Alexander Nevsky unfolds.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Right-Believing Prince)

The Coming of the Mongols

The political world into which Alexander Yaroslavich was born was already fragmented before the Mongols arrived. The Kievan polity that had been baptized under Vladimir (see The Baptism of Rus’) had, by the early thirteenth century, dissolved into a constellation of competing principalities — Vladimir-Suzdal’ in the northeast, Novgorod in the north, Smolensk, Chernigov, Galicia-Volhynia in the southwest, and a Kiev that retained prestige but no longer commanded obedience. Janet Martin describes the period after the death of Vladimir Monomakh (1125) and especially after the sack of Kiev by Andrei Bogoliubskii in 1169 as one of progressive decentralization, in which the Riurikid princes pursued the interests of their own branches rather than any common Kievan order (Martin, Medieval Russia 980–1584, 2nd ed., ch. 4). John Fennell, surveying the same century, frames it bluntly as a “crisis” of disunity that left the Rus’ lands without the capacity for coordinated defense (Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200–1304, ch. 1).

The force that struck this divided land was no raiding party. The Mongol empire forged by Chinggis Khan had, by the 1230s, turned westward under a campaign entrusted to Batu, a grandson of Chinggis through Jochi, with the seasoned general Sübedei as its military mind. The quriltai (assembly) of 1235 had sanctioned a great western expedition; the Volga Bulgars were destroyed in 1236, and in the winter of 1237 the army crossed into the Rus’ lands proper (Fennell, Crisis, ch. 4; Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 5). The Mongols campaigned in winter deliberately: the frozen rivers that in summer were the obstacles and highways of Rus’ became, when iced over, broad roads for cavalry, and the forests that sheltered the principalities offered no barrier to an army that moved on the rivers.

The Sack of Ryazan and Vladimir

The first of the great cities to fall was Ryazan, on the southeastern frontier. The Laurentian Chronicle records the Mongol demand for a tithe — “a tenth of everything” — and the proud refusal attributed to the Ryazan princes; the city was invested and, after a short siege, stormed in December 1237 (Laurentian Chronicle, s.a. 1237; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 4). The literary Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan by Batu, a later and heavily epic text, elaborates the catastrophe with the heroics of Evpatii Kolovrat and the martyrdom of the princely house; it is a moving witness to how Rus’ remembered the calamity, but it is hagiographized memory rather than chronicle and must be read as such (cf. Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 5, on the literary responses to the invasion).

From Ryazan the army moved against the lands of Vladimir-Suzdal’ — the patrimony of Alexander’s own house (see The Prince of Novgorod). Moscow, then a minor town, was taken; Vladimir, the seat of the grand prince, was besieged and fell in February 1238. The chronicles record that Grand Prince Yuri (Iurii) II Vsevolodovich had left the city to gather forces in the north, leaving his family within; the Mongols breached the walls, and the chronicle accounts describe the burning of the Cathedral of the Dormition with members of the princely family and townspeople who had taken refuge inside (Laurentian Chronicle, s.a. 1238; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 4). The Laurentian Chronicle’s lament over Vladimir is one of the principal contemporary windows onto the disaster, and its grief is unfeigned.

The Death of Yuri II at the Sit’ River

Grand Prince Yuri II had withdrawn northward to assemble an army on the Sit’ (Sit’) River, a tributary in the forested country northwest of Vladimir. There, in March 1238, the Mongol force under Burundai fell upon his encampment. The battle was a rout: the grand prince of Vladimir was killed, and with him the field army of the northeast was destroyed (Laurentian Chronicle, s.a. 1238; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 4; Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 5). The death of Yuri II removed the senior prince of the Vladimir line at a single stroke and opened the grand-princely throne to the next in seniority — Yaroslav II Vsevolodovich, Alexander’s father — whose accession was itself bound up with the new Mongol order (see The Prince of Novgorod). The Sit’ is thus a hinge: it ended the old grand-princely generation and made the survival of the dynasty contingent on terms set by the conqueror.

Novgorod Spared: The Turn at Torzhok

After the Sit’ the Mongols pressed northwest, into the territory dependent on Novgorod. The frontier town of Torzhok was besieged and, the Novgorod First Chronicle records, fell after a stubborn two-week defense in the early spring of 1238, its people slaughtered (Novgorod First Chronicle, s.a. 1238, trans. Michell & Forbes; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 4). From Torzhok the army advanced toward Novgorod itself — and then turned back. The chronicles place the turn at a point variously remembered as roughly a hundred versts from the city, near a locality the tradition calls Ignach Cross (Ignach Krest) (Novgorod First Chronicle, s.a. 1238; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 4).

Why Batu turned away short of the greatest prize in the north is genuinely uncertain, and the sources permit no single answer. [Disputed: the Novgorod First Chronicle and the Russian chronicle tradition attribute the withdrawal chiefly to the spring thaw (*rasputitsa*), which turned the river-roads to impassable marsh and threatened to strand the cavalry (Novgorod First Chronicle, s.a. 1238); Fennell, *Crisis* (ch. 4), accepts the thaw as decisive but stresses also the cumulative exhaustion of men and horses after a winter of sieges; Martin, *Medieval Russia* (ch. 5), notes additionally the army's need to regroup and that Novgorod's marshy approaches and the lateness of the season made the siege of so large a city imprudent. No source gives a Mongol motive directly; all reconstructions are inferences from circumstance.] Whatever the cause, the result was momentous: Novgorod the Great was not stormed, not burned, and not depopulated. Its escape from the sack — by geography, season, and the limits of an overextended army rather than by any feat of arms — is the precondition of everything Alexander would later do from the city.

The Destruction of Kiev

The campaign of 1237–1238 had subdued the northeast; in 1239–1240 the Mongols turned against the south. Pereiaslavl’ and Chernigov fell in 1239, and in the autumn and early winter of 1240 the army invested Kiev, the ancient mother-city of Rus’ and the seat of the metropolitan. Kiev was stormed and sacked in December 1240; the chronicles describe the destruction of the city and its churches, and later travelers — most famously the papal envoy John of Plano Carpini, who passed through a few years afterward — reported a depopulated ruin strewn with the bones of the dead (Laurentian Chronicle, s.a. 1240; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 4; Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 5). The fall of Kiev was the symbolic end of the Kievan age. From the campaign of 1240 the Mongols passed on into Galicia and beyond, into Poland and Hungary, before the death of the Great Khan Ögedei in 1241 drew the leading princes homeward and ended the western advance.

The Golden Horde and the Jochid Ulus

What the conquest left behind in the Pontic-Caspian steppe was a new and permanent power. The western lands assigned to the house of Jochi crystallized into the polity later known to the Russians as the Golden Horde (the Zolotaia Orda), the western wing of the Mongol empire, with its administrative center established at Sarai on the lower Volga (Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 6; Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, ch. 1). Donald Ostrowski stresses that the Horde was not a chaotic horde in the colloquial sense but a functioning state with a tax administration, a postal-relay system, and a developed chancery practice, whose institutions the Rus’ principalities — and later Muscovy — would absorb to a degree long underestimated (Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, esp. chs. 1–2; see also The Mongol Yoke and the Rise of Muscovy).

The Rus’ principalities were not annexed and garrisoned in the manner of Mongol rule over China or Persia; they were left under their own Riurikid princes, their own law, and — crucially — their own Church, which the Horde exempted from tribute and protected by yarlyk in accordance with the Mongol policy of religious toleration (Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, ch. 1; Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 6). The relationship was one of vassalage and tribute, mediated by two instruments that would govern Russo-Mongol politics for two centuries.

The Vykhod and the Yarlyk

The first instrument was tribute. The Mongols imposed on the Rus’ lands a regular payment, known in the Russian sources as the vykhod (“the outgoing,” i.e., the tribute carried out to the Horde), assessed by census. The chronicles record the conduct of Mongol censuses (chislo) in the Rus’ lands in the 1250s, the registration of the population for taxation, and the resentment and revolts that the census-takers and tribute-collectors (baskaki) provoked (Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 6; Fennell, Crisis, chs. 5–6). The burden of the vykhod, and the political question of how a prince should manage it, lies directly behind Alexander’s later policy of submission (see Submission to the Mongols).

The second instrument was the yarlyk — the khan’s patent or charter of investiture. A Rus’ prince held his throne legitimately only when confirmed by the khan, and confirmation required the prince to travel to Sarai (and at times onward to the imperial capital at Karakorum) to do homage and receive the yarlyk (Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 6; Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, ch. 1). This turned the internal dynastic order of Rus’ into something adjudicated at the Horde: seniority among the Riurikids now ran through the khan’s grant, and rival princes contended for patents as they had once contended on the battlefield. Alexander’s own father Yaroslav, and Alexander after him, would make the long journey to receive their authority from the conqueror — a fact that defines the political condition of the right-believing prince and is treated in its own place (see Submission to the Mongols).

Novgorod the Great: Constitution of a Spared City

Because Novgorod escaped the sack, its distinctive constitution survived intact into Alexander’s career, and that constitution conditioned everything he could do there. Novgorod was not a principality ruled by a resident dynasty but, in effect, a city-republic that invited its princes and could expel them. Sovereignty rested with the veche, the assembly of the free townsmen, which met to decide war and peace, to confirm or reject treaties, and — notoriously — to summon or dismiss the prince himself (Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 3; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 3).

The invited prince held a circumscribed office. His chief function was military — to lead Novgorod’s forces against external enemies and to defend the frontier — together with a share in justice; but he was bound by sworn agreement (riad) not to interfere in the city’s internal governance, not to acquire estates in Novgorod’s territory at will, and to rule through the city’s own institutions (Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 3; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 3). Real domestic power lay with the Novgorodian boyar aristocracy, who controlled the city through elected officers — above all the posadnik (mayor) and the tysiatskii (commander of the militia, the “thousand”) — and with the archbishop of Novgorod, who after the mid-twelfth century was himself elected locally and stood as the spiritual head and one of the chief political weights of the republic (Martin, Medieval Russia, ch. 3). The Novgorod First Chronicle, the city’s own running record, is filled with notices of princes installed and then driven out, a rhythm that no prince — not even Alexander — could simply override (Novgorod First Chronicle, s.a. various years, trans. Michell & Forbes; Fennell, Crisis, ch. 3).

This is the paradox of Novgorod’s position after 1238. It had been spared the Mongol sack, and so it retained both its wealth — drawn from the Baltic and Volga trade — and its republican liberties; yet a spared and prosperous city on the western frontier was precisely the target of other enemies, the Swedes and the Teutonic and Livonian crusading orders, who pressed on Novgorod’s lands while the rest of Rus’ lay prostrate (see The Swedish Threat (1240); Lake Peipus (1242)). And over time Novgorod too would be drawn into the Horde’s tribute orbit, its census taken and its vykhod assessed like the rest, a process that Alexander himself, as grand prince, would have the unenviable task of enforcing upon his own former city (see Submission to the Mongols). The stage is thus set: a Rus’ broken and tributary in the east and south, one great free city still standing in the north under threat from the west, and a young prince of the Vladimir house seated in that city on the eve of 1240.

References

The Chronicle of Novgorod 1016–1471 (Novgorod First Chronicle). Trans. Robert Michell and Nevill Forbes. London: Camden Society, Third Series, vol. 25, 1914. (Cited by year-entry: the fall of Torzhok and the Mongol turn near Ignach Cross, s.a. 1238; notices of princes installed and expelled, s.a. various years.)
The Laurentian Chronicle (Lavrent’evskaia letopis’). (Cited by year-entry: the demand on Ryazan and its fall, s.a. 1237; the fall of Vladimir and the death of Yuri II at the Sit’, s.a. 1238; the fall of Kiev, s.a. 1240.)
Fennell, John. The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200–1304. London and New York: Longman, 1983. (The disunity of the principalities; Batu’s campaigns of 1237–1240; Ryazan, Vladimir, the Sit’, Torzhok and the turn from Novgorod; the spring thaw; the census, baskaki, and tribute; the Novgorodian constitution.)
Martin, Janet. Medieval Russia 980–1584. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (Kievan decentralization after Monomakh; the conquest; the formation of the Golden Horde and its center at Sarai; the vykhod, the census, and the yarlyk; the Novgorod veche, the riad, the posadnik and tysiatskii, and the archbishop.)
Ostrowski, Donald. Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. (The Golden Horde as a functioning state; the yarlyk and the chancery; the Mongol policy of religious toleration and the exemption of the Church.)