Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.
The Rise and
Fall of the Golden Horde.
A Historical
Note Continued.
And so, Prince Dmitry Donskoy, after his glorious
victory over the forces of Khan Mamai of the Golden Horde at the Kulikovo
Field, where he used a brilliant military maneuver, cutting off Mamai’s core
force from the forces provided by Mamai’s allies, was now facing a new
challenge, namely from the new Khan of the Golden Horde, Tokhtamysh. The latter
did not take Mamai’s defeat lying down, especially after Dmitry’s great victory
emboldened the Russians to stop paying tribute to the Golden Horde altogether.
In response, Tokhtamysh moved against the Russians, burned down several towns
and devastated Moscow.
The coming of Tokhtamysh meant that a new political
strategy had to be adopted by Prince Dmitry. The victory over Mamai gained
little in practical results, except that it raised the spirit of the Russian
people quite considerably. The Russians were firmly set on stopping paying tribute
to the Golden Horde. So, what would be the next move?
In order to figure out the historical role of Khan
Tokhtamysh, who can be safely called a mortal enemy of Russia, we need to look
at another towering figure of the Moslem world at the time, who happened to
play a decisive role in the eventual fate of Khan Tokhtamysh and the Golden
Horde as such. This man is well-known to the whole world. His name is Timur,
also known as Tamerlane, meaning “Timur the Lame,” the great Moslem military
commander and statesman, whose name alone made his enemies tremble. Curiously,
he has always been extremely popular in Russia, and earlier in the USSR, where
the name “Timurovtsy” used to be given to young schoolchildren’s organizations,
appealing to the Russian youth to be the best they can be.
The road to power at the Golden Horde was not an easy
one for Tokhtamysh. Several times he tried and failed, each time fleeing to the
safe harbor of Samarkand under the wing of his powerful protector Timur the
Lame, aka Tamerlane. Each time was he given a new army to substantiate his
claim, until finally Tamerlane’s army brought Tokhtamysh victory, and made him
the Khan of the Golden Horde.
What happened next between these two “friends” is
seemingly hard to understand. Tokhtamysh was no fool, but how could he have
been so stupid as to bite the hand that had fed him? He had been to Samarkand,
he had seen all he needed to see to recognize Tamerlane’s unquestionable
superiority. Benefiting from the great power of his protector, he must have
realized that he had no chance and hardly any reason to challenge that power.
And yet he struck, and paid the price of his sheer folly. In fact, to use the
Japanese word, he committed a harakiri.
***
As for the Grand Prince of Moscow, who in the words of
the Russian historian N. I. Kostomarov, “was collecting subordinate princes for
the common cause of protecting Rus,” could such a man be a pussilanimous man?
Here is Kostomarov again:
“With Dmitry were the forces of the lands
of Moscow, Vladimir, Suzdal, Rostov, Nizhny Novgorod, Belozersk, Murom. There
were also the forces of Pskov under the command of Prince Andrei Olgerdovich,
of Bryansk under Andrei’s brother Prince Dmitry Olgerdovich [that is,
Lithuanian princes].”
The total troop strength, according to the annals, was
150,000 men. Even if the number is exaggerated, it was still an astonishingly
large army gathered by Prince Dmitry of Moscow. Having laid a trap for his
enemy, Dmitry hid a fresh unit in a forest nearby, and having selected the
right people for this purpose, he obviously had to be a very smart man. During
the battle with the Tatars, part of the fighting Russians ran toward the
forest, pursued by Mamai’s men. The Lithuanian reserve did not budge, but
allowed the running Russians and their pursuers to pass by. Only then, on the
signal of their commander Bobrok, the fresh troop attacked the Tartars from the
rear. Panic arose among the Tatars, they started running and many drowned in
the waters of the Don.
Prince Dmitry, working on very good advice, made the
right decision to cross the Don, in order to fight the Tatars with his army’s
back to the river, cutting off any possibility of retreat for the Russian
troops, which meant till victory. Such a man could hardly be guilty of wrong
decisions.
Having left Moscow (not fled, as some historians would
want us to believe, but left!), before the advance of the new post-Mamai Khan
Tokhtamysh in 1382, Prince Dmitry must have made the right decision, ordering
the people finding refuge in the Kremlin to under no circumstances open the
gates of the heavily fortified citadel. It was therefore not his fault that the
defenders of the Kremlin fell victim to the cheap trick of Tokhtamysh,
promising to spare everybody if they just please open the gates.
Tokhtamysh triumphed by means of a treacherous scheme,
which is why it is so important to understand what happened afterwards.
But why did Dmitry Donskoy abandon Moscow to
Tokhtamysh, in the first place? This was a painful but unavoidable decision.
While Tokhtamysh was able in no time to raise up a strong army for his attack
on Moscow, the winner of Kulikovo could not perform a similar feat. His army,
albeit victorious against Mamai, was sorely depleted and had no time to
regenerate. Any military confrontation with Tokhtamysh was bound to end in a
disaster for Dmitry Donskoy, and he chose to abandon Moscow to the enemy as the
only way to save Russia.
Ironically, the great Russian military commander
Kutuzov used exactly the same logic against Napoleon, yet nobody would ever
dare to call him a coward!
Returning to the devastated Moscow, Prince Dmitry
Donskoy knew better than to cry foul. Instead, he sent a delegation to the
Golden Horde, headed by his son Vasily. On receiving the delegation, Tokhtamysh
took Vasily as his hostage and sent the others back with a demand to pay back the
whole tribute owed by the Russians to the Horde, in the amount of 8,000 rubles.
Meanwhile, having stayed as hostage in the Golden
Horde for two-plus years, Dmitry’s son managed to escape. The year 1385 saw him
in Moldavia, from where he moved to Lithuania.
This is already a highly unusual phenomenon. Other
hostages trying to escape were normally caught and subjected to a gruesome
execution. But what happened after that, in the year 1387, dramatically alters
the whole picture.
To be continued…
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