Batu comes west — Ryazan, Vladimir, the Sit

By 1236 the Mongol armies had reached the Volga region and defeated the Volga Bulgars, an important state whose lands lay to the east of Rus’. That victory was not a side raid. It opened the way toward the principalities, and it showed what kind of campaign this now was. There was no uncertainty about the scale of the danger. The Mongol forces were not a small party crossing the frontier in search of plunder. They were part of a major imperial campaign commanded by Batu and supported by experienced generals and large numbers of troops. The army included cavalry from different parts of the Mongol Empire and specialists who could assist with the capture of fortified settlements. The princes of Rus’ were no longer meeting a reconnaissance. They were meeting the western arm of an empire that had already learned how to take cities.

The first great blow fell on Ryazan in the winter of 1237. Ryazan was one of the principalities of north-eastern Rus’, situated near the frontier of the steppe, and that position made it particularly exposed. According to the Russian chronicles, the Mongols demanded submission and tribute. The negotiations failed. The city was then surrounded. Winter itself was severe, but winter did not stop this army. The attackers were accustomed to long campaigns in difficult conditions. They depended heavily on their horses for movement and communication, and frozen ground, which made ordinary travel harder for a merchant or a peasant, could serve an army that already thought in terms of distance. Ryazan was eventually taken and destroyed. The chronicles describe the destruction in deeply tragic terms, and later generations remembered the event as one of the first great disasters of the invasion. We should be careful with the exact numbers given by medieval sources. Chroniclers often used large figures to express the scale of a catastrophe rather than to count bodies. The basic fact is not in serious doubt. The city suffered enormous destruction. Many people died. Its political life was severely damaged. The fall of Ryazan also demonstrated, to anyone still watching from a neighbouring town, what was likely to happen to those who resisted without being able to receive help in time.

After Ryazan the Mongol army moved farther west. Kolomna became one of the next important points of resistance. The fighting there was costly, and among those who fought against the Mongols was Prince Roman of Ryazan and other Russian warriors. The Mongols then moved toward Moscow. The city was smaller than the great centres of Vladimir or Kyiv, but it occupied an important position in the north-eastern lands, on routes that connected river and forest. It was taken and burned. The speed of the campaign mattered as much as its violence. The destruction of one town did not give the neighbouring towns enough time to organise a common defence. Each principality still thought, as it had always thought, in terms of its own walls, its own prince, and the hope that an army might arrive from somewhere else. An imperial campaign that could move in winter did not wait for those hopes to become a plan.

The Mongol army then approached Vladimir, the leading city of north-eastern Rus’. Vladimir was the political centre of a large principality. It had impressive churches, princely buildings, and fortified defences. It looked like a capital, and in the north-east it had become one. Its ruler, Grand Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich, was not in the city when the Mongols arrived. He had gone north to gather an army. The defence of Vladimir was left to members of the princely family and the city’s inhabitants. After a siege, the walls were breached and the city was captured. The destruction of Vladimir was a major political and human disaster, not only because a famous town burned, but because a whole regional order had been gathered around it. Other towns in the region were attacked as the campaign continued. Some resisted and were destroyed after prolonged fighting. Others surrendered. Medieval towns were not simply collections of houses. They were centres of administration, craft production, trade, religion, and princely authority. When a city was burned, the damage went far beyond its walls. Workshops disappeared. Merchants lost their property. Churches were damaged. People were killed or carried away. The surrounding countryside could lose the institutions that connected it to the wider political world: the place where disputes were heard, taxes gathered, goods exchanged, and a prince’s name made real.

Geography shaped the campaign as much as walls did. The Russian lands were crossed by large rivers and covered by forests, marshes, and open fields. In ordinary seasons those features slowed an army and protected a town. In winter, frozen rivers could become roads. They allowed forces to move through areas that were otherwise difficult to cross, and they favoured commanders who already thought of a landscape as a set of routes rather than as a set of separate homelands. The Mongols were skilled at choosing those routes and at maintaining communication between different parts of their army. Their horses allowed them to cover long distances. Their commanders could divide the army into separate forces and bring them together when necessary. What looked, from inside a principality, like a sudden appearance at the walls was often the result of that kind of movement: not magic, and not a storm that fell evenly on all Rus’, but a campaign that knew where to go and when.

In the spring of 1238 the Mongols fought a major battle with the army of Grand Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich on the Sit River. Yuri was killed. The defeat removed one of the most important military leaders of north-eastern Rus’, the man who had left Vladimir in the hope of meeting the invasion in the field. After the campaign in the north-east, Batu’s army did not attempt to conquer every settlement or permanently occupy every part of the region. It eventually withdrew toward the steppe. Some towns had survived. Life would return to them. The political order, however, had been badly damaged. A grand prince was dead. A leading city had been taken. The old assumption that a north-eastern capital could still organise a defence of its own world had been broken in a single winter and a single spring.

The campaign of 1237–1238 cannot be described simply as the destruction of all Rus’.

The campaign of 1237–1238 cannot be described simply as the destruction of all Rus’. Much of the country was never directly occupied by the Mongol army. Several important territories remained outside the main route of the invasion. Novgorod, for example, was not captured. The Mongols turned back before reaching it. Geography, distance, the season, and the practical limits of a large army all mattered. An empire can be vast and still have to choose where to spend its strength. The invasion was devastating, but it followed particular routes and affected different regions in different ways. That unevenness would later be remembered poorly, because memory prefers a single fire. The campaign itself was more precise, and therefore in some places more total, than a story of general ruin.

For several years after the campaign in the north-east, the Mongols continued their western advance. In 1239 they attacked the southern principalities. In 1240 they turned against Kyiv. By then the political map of Rus’ had already changed. Many cities had been destroyed or weakened. Several princes had been killed. The survivors understood that the power they were facing was not going to disappear after one campaign, as the riders of 1223 had seemed to disappear. The Mongol armies had come from far away. They had now become a permanent part of the political geography of Eastern Europe. The next blow would fall on the city that still held the oldest name of Rus’, even if it no longer held the oldest power.