The Mongol-Tatar invasion is one of the most tragic events in Russian history. Destroyed and plundered cities, thousands of victims - all this could not have happened if the Russian princes united in the face of a common threat. The fragmentation of forces greatly facilitated the task of the invaders.
Conqueror forces
The army of Khan Batu invaded Russian lands in December 1237. Before that, it ruined the Volga Bulgaria. There is no single point of view regarding the size of the Mongol army.
According to Nikolai Karamzin, Batu had a 500,000-strong army. True, in the future, the historian changed this figure by 300 thousand. In any case, the power is enormous.
A traveler from Italy, Giovanni del Plano Carpini, claims that 600 thousand people invaded Russia, and the Hungarian historian Simon - 500 thousand. It was said that Batu's army took 20 days of travel in length and 15 in width, and it would take more than two months to get around it completely.
Modern researchers adhere to more conservative estimates: from 120 to 150 thousand. In any case, the Mongols outnumbered the forces of the Russian principalities, which, noted the historian Sergei Soloviev, all together (with the exception of Novgorod) were able to field no more than 50 thousand soldiers.
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The first victim
Ryazan became the first Russian city to fall under the blows of an alien enemy. Her fate was terrible. For five days, the defenders, led by Prince Yuri Igorevich, heroically fought off the attacks. Arrows fell on the heads of the invaders, boiling water and tar poured, fires broke out in the city here and there - in a word, a real bloody meat grinder.
On the night of December 21, the city fell. With the help of rams, the Mongols broke into the city and staged a savage massacre - most of the inhabitants, led by the prince, died, the rest were taken into slavery. The city itself was completely destroyed and was never rebuilt. The present Ryazan has nothing to do with the past - it is the former Pereyaslavl Ryazan, to which the capital of the principality was moved.
300 goats
One of the most heroic episodes of resistance to the invaders is the defense of the small town of Kozelsk. The Mongols, possessing an overwhelming numerical superiority, with catapults and battering rams at their disposal, could not take the city with wooden walls for almost 50 days.
The Mongol-Tatars eventually managed to climb the rampart and capture part of the fortifications. And then the goats, quite unexpectedly, came out of the gate and rushed at the enemy in a fierce attack. 300 brave men were able to destroy four thousand warriors of Batu, and among them were three commanders - the descendants of Genghis Khan himself. Kozeltsy performed a feat and perished every single one, including 12-year-old Prince Vasily, who fought like a simple warrior.
Batu was furious with the stubborn defense of the city. He ordered to destroy it, and sprinkle the earth with salt. For rebelliousness, the invaders called Kozelsk "the evil city".
Attack of the dead
In January 1238 Batu moved towards Vladimir. At this moment, Ryazan boyar Evpatiy Kolovrat, who was in Chernigov, having learned about what had happened and rushed to his native land. There he managed to gather a detachment of 1,700 brave souls and rush after the many thousands of Mongol-Tatars.
Overtook the invaders Kolovrat in the Suzdal region. His detachment immediately launched an attack on the numerically superior Mongol rearguard. The invaders were in a panic: they did not expect a blow from the rear, from the devastated Ryazan land. The dead themselves rose from their graves and came for us, said the warriors of Batu.
Batu sent his brother-in-law Khostovrul against Kolovrat. He boasted that he would easily kill the impudent Ryazan man, but he himself fell from his sword. The invaders managed to defeat the Kolovrat squad only with the help of catapults. As a sign of respect for the Ryazan people, the khan released the prisoners.
All-Russian catastrophe
The damage caused by the Horde for that time was comparable to the Napoleonic invasion for the 19th century and the Great Patriotic War for the 20th century. According to archaeologists, of the 74 cities that existed in the middle of the XIII century in Russia, 49 did not survive the invasion of Batu, another 15 turned into villages and villages. Only the northwestern Russian lands - Novgorod, Pskov and Smolensk - were not affected.
The exact number of those killed and taken prisoner is unknown; historians speak of hundreds of thousands of people. Many crafts were lost, due to which the level of socio-economic development of Rus dropped sharply. According to some historians, it was precisely the damage that was caused to the Russian principalities by the Mongol-Tatars that determined the catching-up model of Russia's development in the future.
Civil strife?
It is believed that in reality there was no Mongol-Tatar invasion. According to Yu. D. Petukhov, there was a large-scale civil strife among the Russian princes. As proof, he refers to the absence of the term "Mongol-Tatars" in the Old Russian chronicles. The word Mongol allegedly came from "could", "we can", which means "powerful", thus, the word "Mongols" then meant not a people, but a strong army.
Supporters of this version refer to the fact that the backward nomads could not create a huge war machine and the Eurasian empire, in addition, there is practically no evidence of the existence of an industry among the Mongols that could produce military equipment, and the population of the Mongolian steppes was too small to conquer the huge Chinese empire, Central Asia and other countries.
The proof is also given the fact that the Russians had a decimal system of organizing troops, moreover, V. Alekseev in his work "In Search of Ancestors", archaeologists did not find a Mongoloid element in the burial grounds of that period.
Ivan Proshkin