The Mongol detachments, united by Genghis Khan, conquered the neighboring peoples - the Yenisei Kirghiz, Buryats, Yakuts and Uighurs, defeated the civilization of Primorye, and by 1215 conquered Northern China. Here, the Mongol generals adopted siege equipment from Chinese engineers to storm the fortresses. In 1218, the commanders of Genghis Khan conquered Korea, and the next year, an army of 200,000 attacked the cities of Khorezm. During two years of hostilities, the agricultural regions of Semirechye were turned into pastures, most of the inhabitants were destroyed, and the artisans were taken into slavery. In 1221, Genghis Khan subdued all of Central Asia. After this campaign, Genghis Khan Divided his huge power into uluses.

In the spring of 1223 A 30,000-strong detachment of Mongols led by Jebe and Subedei, having passed along the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, invaded Transcaucasia. Having defeated the Armenian-Georgian army and devastated Georgia and Azerbaijan, the invaders broke through the Derbent passage to the North Caucasus and defeated the Alans and Polovtsians.

The Mongol-Tatars were able to conquer the states that were at the highest stage of development, because:

1) excellent organization of the troops (decimal system)

2) borrowing military equipment from the Chinese

3) the number of troops

4) well-organized intelligence

5) rigidity in relation to the resisting cities (they destroyed the recalcitrant cities, burned, destroyed, and the inhabitants were either taken away into captivity (artisans, women, children), or exterminated). Consequently, the cities surrendered voluntarily.

6) psychological factors (use of sound elements).

Battle of the Kalka (1223)

The Polovtsians, led by Khan Kotyan, centuries-old enemies of Rus', turned to the Russian princes for help against the Mongol-Tatars. At the initiative of Mstislav Mstislavich Udaly (Prince of Galicia, was married to the daughter of Khan Kotyan), at the congress of South Russian princes in Kyiv, it was decided to come to the aid of the Polovtsy. A large Russian army led by the three strongest princes of Southern Rus' entered the steppe: Mstislav Romanovich of Kyiv, Mstislav Svyatoslavich of Chernigov and Mstislav Mstislavovich of Galicia. In the lower reaches of the Dnieper, it united with the Polovtsian forces. On May 31, 1223, a battle took place near the Sea of ​​Azov, on the Kalka River, in which the Russian-Polovtsian army was defeated as a result of uncoordinated actions and intra-princely strife: against the enemy, Mstislav of Kiev stood with his forces on one of the hills and did not participate in the battle. The Mongols managed to withstand the blow, and then went on the offensive. The Polovtsy, who fled from the battlefield, were the first to be defeated. This put the Galician and Volyn rati in a difficult position. The Mongols broke the resistance of the Russians.

Now it is the turn of the most powerful part of the Russian army - the Kyiv rati. An attempt to take the Russian camp by attack, the Mongols failed, and then they went to the trick. Dzhebe and Subede promised Mstislav of Kyiv and other princes peace and the passage of their troops to their homeland. When the princes opened their camp and left it, the Mongols rushed to the Russian squads. All Russian soldiers were captured.

During the battle on the Kalka, 6 princes died, only every tenth of the soldiers returned. Only the Kiev army lost about 10 thousand people. This defeat turned out to be one of the most difficult for Rus' in history.

Batu's invasion of Rus'

In 1227, the founder of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan, died. The ulus of the eldest son of Jochi, who died in the same year as his father, Dostal to the grandson of the conqueror - Batu Khan (Batu). It is this ulus, located west of the river. The Irtysh was supposed to become the main springboard for the aggressive campaign to the West.

In 1235, at the next kurultai of the Mongol nobility in Karakorum, a decision was made on a general Mongol campaign in Europe. The forces of one ulus of Jochi were not enough. Therefore, troops of other Genghisids were sent to help Batu. Batu himself was put at the head of the campaign, and the experienced commander Subedei was appointed adviser.

The offensive began in the autumn of 1236, and a year later the Mongol conquerors conquered the Volga Bulgaria, as well as the Polovtsian hordes that roamed between the Volga and Don rivers.

Late autumn 1237. the main forces of Batu were concentrated in the upper reaches of the river. Voronezh for the invasion of North-Eastern Rus'. In Rus', they knew about the formidable danger, but the princely feuds prevented them from joining forces to repel a strong and treacherous enemy. There was no unified command. Fortifications of cities were erected to defend neighboring Russian principalities, and not from the steppe nomads. The princely cavalry squads were not inferior to the Mongol noyons and nukers in terms of armament and fighting qualities. But the bulk of the Russian army was made up of the militia - urban and rural warriors, inferior to the Mongols in weapons and combat skills.

The defeat of Ryazan

The first principality to undergo ruthless ruin was the Ryazan land. The sovereign Russian princes had nothing to oppose to this invasion. Princely feuds did not allow united forces to be put up against Batu. The princes of Vladimir and Chernigov refused to help Ryazan. Approaching the Ryazan land, Batu demanded from the Ryazan princes a tenth of "everything that is in your land."

In the hope of reaching an agreement with Batu, the Ryazan prince sent an embassy to him with rich gifts, which was headed by the prince's son Fedor. Having accepted the gifts, the khan put forward humiliating and impudent demands: in addition to a huge tribute, to give princely sisters and daughters as wives to the Mongol nobility. And for himself personally, he looked after the beautiful Evpraksinya, Fedor's wife. The prince answered with a decisive refusal and, together with the ambassadors, was put to a painful execution. And the princess, together with her little son, in order not to get to the conquerors, rushed down from the bell tower. The Ryazan army went against Batu, and "met him near the Ryazan borders." The battle was very difficult twelve times the Russian squad left the encirclement, “one Ryazan fought with a thousand, and two with darkness (ten thousand)” - this is how the chronicle writes about this battle. But Batu's superiority in strength was great, the Ryazanians suffered heavy losses. It was the turn of the fall of Ryazan. Ryazan held out for five days, on the sixth day, on the morning of December 21, it was taken. The entire city was destroyed and all the inhabitants were exterminated. The Mongol-Tatars left behind only ashes. The Ryazan prince and his family also perished. The surviving residents of the Ryazan land gathered a squad (about 1700 people), headed by Evpaty Kolovrat. They caught up with the enemy in the Suzdal land and began to wage partisan struggle against him, inflicting heavy losses on the Mongols.

The defeat of the Vladimir principality

Having ruined the Ryazan land, in January 1238. Mongol invaders defeated the grand duke guard regiment of the Vladimir-Suzdal land near Kolomna, led by the grand duke's son Vsevolod Yuryevich.

Strong resistance to the enemy for 5 days was provided by the population of Moscow, led by the governor Philip Nyanka. After the capture by the Mongols, Moscow was burned, and its inhabitants were killed.

Then the Mongols captured Suzdal and a number of other cities.

February 4, 1238 Batu besieged Vladimir. The distance from Kolomna to Vladimir (300 km) was covered by his troops in a month. On the fourth day of the siege, the invaders broke into the city through gaps in the fortress wall near the Golden Gate. The princely family and the remnants of the troops closed in the Assumption Cathedral. The Mongols surrounded the cathedral with trees and set it on fire. After the capture of Vladimir, the hordes of conquerors scattered throughout the Vladimir-Suzdal land, plundering and destroying everything in their path. (14 cities were destroyed)

March 4, 1238 beyond the Volga, on the river. City, a battle took place between the main forces of North-Eastern Rus', headed by the Grand Duke of Vladimir Yuri Vsevolodovich and the Mongol invaders. The Russian army was defeated, and the Grand Duke himself died.

After the capture of the "suburb" of Novgorod land - Torzhok, the road to North-Western Rus' was opened before the conquerors. However, the approach of spring thaw and significant human losses forced the Mongols, not having reached Veliky Novgorod about 100 miles, to turn back to the Polovtsian sepia. On the way, they defeated Kursk and the small town of Kozelsk on the river. Zhizdra. The defenders of Kozelsk put up fierce resistance to the enemy, defending themselves for seven weeks. After its capture in May 1238. Batu ordered to wipe out this "evil city" from the face of the earth, and to exterminate the remaining inhabitants without exception.

Summer 1238 Batu spent in the Don steppes, restoring the strength of his troops. However, already in the fall, his detachments again devastated the Ryazan land, capturing Gorkhovets, Murom and several other cities. In the spring of the following year, 1239, the Batu troops defeated the Principality of Pereyaslavl, and in the autumn the Chernigov-Seversk land was devastated.

Autumn 1240. Mongol rati moved to conquer Western Europe through South Rus'. In September they crossed the Dnieper and surrounded Kyiv. After a long siege on December 6, 1240. the city fell. The South Russian princes were never able to organize a united defense of their lands. In the winter of 1240 - 1241. Mongolian tumens captured almost all the cities of Southern Rus', with the exception of Kholm, Kamenets and Danilov.

Batu's campaign in Europe

After the defeat of Rus', the Mongol hordes moved to Europe. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Balkan countries were devastated. The Mongols reached the borders of the German Empire, reached the Adriatic Sea. However, at the end of 1242 they suffered a series of setbacks in Bohemia and Hungary. From the distant Karakorum came the news of the death of the great Khan Ogedei - the son of Genghis Khan. It was a convenient excuse to stop the difficult campaign. Batu turned his troops back to the east. A decisive world-historical role in the salvation of European civilization from the Mongol hordes was played by the heroic struggle against them by the Russian and other peoples of our country, who took the first blow from the invaders. In fierce battles in Rus', the best part of the Mongol army perished. The Mongols lost their offensive power. They could not but reckon with the liberation struggle unfolding in the rear of their troops. A. S. Pushkin rightly wrote: “Russia was assigned a great destiny: its boundless plains absorbed the power of the Mongols and stopped their invasion on the very edge of Europe ... the emerging enlightenment was saved by torn Russia”

Upon his return in 1243. Batu formed the westernmost ulus - the state of the Golden Horde with the capital Sarai-Batu. The state created by Batu occupied a vast territory: from the Siberian rivers Irtysh and Ob - in the east to the Carpathians and Danube - in the West and from the Caspian steppes and the Caucasus Mountains - in the south to the black earth strip and the upper reaches of the Volga and Kama - in the north.

The wars of the Mongol khans, aimed first at creating a world empire, and later, after the collapse of a single Mongol state, at expanding and holding the territory of the Mongol states formed in various regions of the world.

At the beginning of the XIII century, the tribes of modern Mongolia were united by Genghis Khan (Temuchin) into a single state. In 1206, the kurultai (council of khans) proclaimed Temujin Genghis Khan (ruler of the strong).

The Mongols were pastoral nomads. Almost the entire adult population was not only shepherds, but also horsemen. All Mongols were personally free. They made up an army of up to 120 thousand people. The light and heavy Mongol cavalry was supplemented by infantry, recruited from conquered and allied peoples. Every 10 wagons of the Mongols were supposed to put up from 1 to 3 warriors. Several families of 10 wagons were supposed to field 10 warriors. Warriors did not receive salaries, but lived solely at the expense of booty. The army was divided into tens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands (tumens). The main weapon of the Mongols was the bow, each of which had several quivers of arrows. The warriors also had spears with iron hooks, which could be used to pull enemy riders off their horses, curved sabers, leather helmets (the nobility had iron ones), lassoes and light long pikes.

Between 1194 and 1206, the Mongols conquered Manchuria, northern China, and southern Siberia. In 1206, 1207 and 1209 the Mongols were at war with the Tangut kingdom in Northwestern China. In 1211, Genghis Khan started a war with China and in 1215 stormed and sacked Beijing.

In 1218, the kurultai decided to go to war with Khorezm, the largest state in Central Asia. On the way to Khorezm, a 20,000-strong detachment under the command of Chebe conquered the Kara-Chinese Empire. Another detachment of the Mongol army headed for the Khorezm city of Otrar near the Syr Darya River. The Khorezm sultan (Khorezmshah) Muhammad with a strong army came out to meet this detachment. A battle took place north of Samarkand, which did not lead to decisive results. The Mongols defeated the left wing and the center of the enemy, but their left wing, in turn, was defeated by the right wing of the Khorezmians, led by the Sultan's son Jalal-ed-Din.

With the onset of darkness, both armies withdrew from the battlefield. Mohammed returned to Bukhara, and the Mongols - to meet the army of Genghis Khan, who set out on a campaign at the end of 1218. Muhammad did not dare to engage in battle with the main forces of the Mongols and retreated to Samarkand, leaving strong garrisons in a number of fortresses. Genghis Khan with the bulk of his troops moved to Bukhara, detaching his son Jochi to the Seyhun River and the city of Dzhendu, and the other two sons, Chagatai and Oktay, to Otrar.

In March 1220, Bukhara was taken and plundered, and the 20,000-strong garrison was almost completely killed. The same fate befell Samarkand with a garrison of 40,000. Mohammed's army gradually dispersed. Its remnants retreated to Iran. On May 24, 1220, the 30,000-strong Mongol corps under the command of Jebe and Subede cut off the retreat of the Khorezm army, occupying Nishapur on May 24. Muhammad's 30,000-strong army dispersed without accepting battle.

Meanwhile, Jochi, after a seven-month siege, occupied the Khorezm capital of Urgench. Historians claim that the Mongols destroyed 2,400 thousand inhabitants of the city, but this figure is exaggerated to the point of absurdity: it is unlikely that the entire population of the cities of Khorezm much exceeded this value.

Genghis Khan's army took Balkh and Talekan. Genghis Khan's son Tului besieged Merv for half a year, which he took in April 1221 with the help of 3 thousand ballistas, 300 catapults, 700 machines for throwing oil bombs and 4 thousand assault ladders.

Shortly after the fall of Merv, Mohammed died, and his son Jalal-ed-Din continued the fight against the Mongols. He managed to gather a large army and defeat the 30,000-strong detachment of the Mongols near Kabul. Genghis Khan moved against Jalal-ed-Din with the main forces. On December 9, 1221, a battle took place between them on the banks of the Indus River. The Mongols defeated the flanks of the Khorezmians and pressed their center to the Indus. Jalal-ed-Din with four thousand surviving soldiers escaped by swimming.

In subsequent years, the Mongols completed the conquest of Khorezm and invaded Tibet. In 1225, Genghis Khan returned to Mongolia with rich booty.

The detachment of Subede (Subedei), passing through Northern Iran, invaded the Caucasus in 1222, defeated the army of the Georgian king, took Derbent and entered the Polovtsian steppes through the Shirvan gorge. The Mongols defeated the army of the Polovtsy, Lezgins, Circassians and Alans, and at the beginning of 1223 they raided the Crimea, where they captured Surozh (Sudak). In the spring they returned to the Polovtsian steppes and drove the Polovtsians to the Dnieper.

The Polovtsian Khan Kotyan asked his son-in-law, the Galician prince Mstislav, for help. He gathered in Kyiv a council of South Russian princes, at which it was decided to put up a united army against the Mongols. Together with the Polovtsians, it concentrated on the right bank of the Dnieper near Oleshya.

Princes Daniil Volynsky and Mstislav of Galicia with a thousand horsemen crossed the Dnieper and defeated the advance detachment of the Mongols. However, this success ruined the Russian-Polovtsian army. Not having a clear idea of ​​​​the enemy's forces, it moved beyond the Dnieper to the Polovtsian steppes.

Nine days later, the Allies approached the Kalka (Kalets) River. Here the rivalry between the two most powerful princes, Mstislav of Kyiv and Mstislav of Galicia, manifested itself. The Kiev prince offered to defend himself on the right bank of the Kalka, and the Galician prince, along with most of the other princes and the Polovtsians, crossed the river on May 31, 1223. The advance detachment of Daniil Volynsky and the Polovtsian commander Yarun suddenly stumbled upon the main forces of Subede and was put to flight. The fugitives mixed the ranks of the squad of Mstislav Galitsky. Following them, the Mongol cavalry broke into the location of the main forces of the Russian army. The Russian squads fled in disarray for the Kalka and further to the Dnieper. Only Mstislav of Galicia and Daniil Volynsky managed to escape with the remnants of their squads. Six princes, including Mstislav Chernigov, died.

The Mongols besieged the camp of Mstislav of Kyiv. His squad managed to repulse several attacks. Then Subede promised to release Mstislav with the soldiers back home for a ransom. However, when the Russians left the camp, the Mongols captured them, and Mstislav of Kyiv and two of his allied princes were executed by a terrible death. Boards were placed on the unfortunate, and feasting Mongol commanders sat on them.

The defeat of the Russian troops was caused by the disagreements of the Russian princes and the higher combat effectiveness of the Mongolian light cavalry. In addition, the army of Subede and Jebe got the opportunity to beat the enemy in parts. The Mongol army in the battle on Kalka numbered up to 30 thousand people. There is no data on the size of the Russian-Polovtsian army, but it was probably approximately equal to the Mongol one.

After the victory at Kalka, Chebe and Subede moved to the middle Volga. Here the Mongols could not break the resistance of the Volga Bulgars and returned to Asia by the Caspian steppes, where in 1225 they joined the army of Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan and his eldest son Jochi died in 1227. The second son of Genghis Khan Ogedei (Oktay) became the Great Khan. After the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire was divided among his sons into four khanates. The Great Khan himself ruled in the Eastern Khanate, which included Mongolia, northern China, Manchuria and part of India. His brother Jagatai received Central Asia and the upper reaches of the Ob and Irtysh. The ulus of Jochi, which included a vast territory from northern Turkestan to the lower reaches of the Danube, was headed by his son Batu (Batu). The Persian Khanate, which included Persia proper and Afghanistan, was headed by Hulagu.

In 1234, the conquest of the Jurchen state of Jin in the territory of Northeast China was completed. In this war, they were short-sightedly assisted by the troops of the southern Chinese state of Song, which itself soon became a victim of Mongol aggression. In 1235, Oktai convened a kurultai, at which it was decided to undertake campaigns in Korea, South China, India and Europe. The campaign against European countries was led by the son of Jochi Batu (Batu) and Subede.

In February 1236, they concentrated an army in the upper reaches of the Irtysh and headed for the middle Volga. Here the Mongols conquered the state of the Volga Bulgars, and then moved to Rus'. In the same year, the conquest of Armenia and Georgia was completed, weakened by the war with the Khorezmshah Jalal-ed-Din, who in 1226 captured and plundered Tbilisi.

In 1237, the Mongol army invaded the Ryazan principality. The Tatars (as the Mongols were called in Rus') defeated the advance detachment of the Ryazanians on the Voronezh River. The Ryazan prince and his vassals, the princes of Murom and Pronsky, turned to the Grand Duke of Vladimir Yuri Vsevolodovich for help, but his army did not have time to prevent the fall of Ryazan. The city was taken on December 25 after a 9-day siege. The small Ryazan squad could not resist the more than 60,000-strong Mongol army.

Batu moved through Kolomna to Moscow. Near Kolomna, the Mongols defeated the army of the Vladimir prince (the prince himself with his retinue was not in his ranks) Batu burned Moscow and went to Vladimir. On February 7, 1238, the city was taken after a four-day siege.

Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich tried to gather the forces of the northeastern Russian principalities. He stood with his army on the City River, not far from the fork in the road to Novgorod and Beloozersk. On March 4, 1238, the Mongols suddenly appeared, passing through Tver and Yaroslavl, and hit the Vladimir prince's army on the flank. Yuri Vladimirovich was killed, and his army was scattered.

The further path of the Mongols lay in the direction of Novgorod. Batu's army took Torzhok. But at the tract Ignach Krest, 200 km from Novgorod, the Mongol army suddenly turned back. The reasons for this turn are not entirely clear today.

In the winter of 1239, Batu's army began a large campaign in Southwestern Rus' and Central Europe. From the Polovtsian steppes, the Mongols marched to Chernigov, which was taken and burned without much difficulty. Then Batu went to Kyiv. The Kyiv princes, who fought for the throne of the grand duke, left the city, withdrawing their squads. The city was defended by a small detachment led by Tysyatsky Dmitry with the support of the city militia. With the help of siege weapons, the Mongols destroyed the walls. In 1240 Kyiv fell.

In January 1241, Batu divided his army into three detachments. One detachment invaded Poland, another - into Silesia and Moravia, the third - into Hungary and Transylvania. The first two detachments took Sandomierz together, and then split up. One took Lenchica, and the other defeated the Polish army at Shidlovice on March 18, 1241, and then unsuccessfully besieged Breslau. Near Liegnitz, both detachments again connected and were able to defeat the combined army of German and Polish knights. This battle took place on April 9 near the village of Wahlstedt.

Then the Mongols moved into Moravia. Here, the Bohemian boyar Yaroslav managed to defeat the detachment of the Mongolian commander Peta near Olmutz. In Bohemia, the Mongols met the combined troops of the Czech king and the dukes of Austria and Carinthia. Petya had to retreat.

The main forces of the Mongols, led by Batu, advanced in Hungary. On March 12, 1241, they managed to defeat the Hungarian detachments defending the Carpathian passes near the cities of Ungvar and Munkács. King Bela IV of Hungary with his army was in Pest. Meanwhile, detachments of the Mongols from all over Europe flocked to Hungary, since there was an abundance of grass for their horses on the Hungarian plain. At the end of June, Subede's detachment from Poland and Peta's detachment from Moravia arrived here. On March 16, 1241, the Mongol vanguards appeared at Pest. Here they were confronted by a united army of Hungarians, Croats, Austrians and French knights. Batu besieged Pest for two months, but did not dare to storm a strong fortress defended by a numerous garrison, and retreated from the city.

The Hungarians and their allies pursued the Mongols for 6 days and reached the Shaio River. At night, the Mongol army suddenly crossed the river, pushing back the Hungarian detachment guarding the bridge. In the morning, the allies saw a large mass of Mongol cavalry on the coastal hills. The knights attacked the Mongols, but were repelled by mounted archers backed up by stone-throwing machines. One of the Hungarian detachments was lured into ravines by a feigned retreat and destroyed there. Then the Mongols surrounded the camp of the allied troops and began to fire at it. The army of King Bela began to retreat to the Danube. The Mongols organized a parallel pursuit. The Hungarians and their allies suffered heavy losses. The Mongols destroyed the stragglers and single knights. On the shoulders of the retreating Batu troops broke into Pest. The Mongols pursued the remnants of the Hungarian army in Croatia and Dalmatia.

King Bela took refuge on one of the islands near the Adriatic coast. The Mongols were unable to take the heavily fortified ports of Split and Dubrovnik and turned back. Batu, at the head of the bulk of the troops along the Danube valley and the Black Sea coast, returned to the lower reaches of the Volga. The formal reason for the return was the need to take part in the kurultai, convened after the death of the great Khan Udegei (he died on November 11, 1241). However, the real reason was the impossibility to keep the conquests in Central and Eastern Europe. Batu failed to take many fortresses and defeat the main forces of the European sovereigns, who were able to unite in the face of the Mongol danger. In the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, this was easier to do, since here the population density was much higher than in Rus', and, accordingly, the troops of individual feudal lords needed to travel much shorter distances to connect with each other. In addition, in Southwestern Europe there were strong stone fortresses that the Mongols were unable to take. In Rus', most of the fortresses were wooden and, with rare exceptions, like Kozelsk, Batu's army did not spend much time besieging them.

In 1243, the Mongol troops, whose allies were Georgians and Armenians, defeated the army of the Seljuk Turks led by the Sultan of Rum. In 1245, the Mongols reached Damascus, and in 1258 captured Baghdad. a state virtually independent of the Karakorum.

In 1235, the Mongols began raiding the Sung state. In 1251, when Mongke became the Great Khan of the Mongols, military operations in South China intensified. In 1252-1253, the state of Nanzhao, neighboring the Song, was conquered in the territory of modern Yun'an province. In 1257, the Mongol troops occupied North Vietnam and the following year launched an offensive against the Chinese city of Changsha, which was approached from the north by the army of the future Great Khan Kublai. But they failed to take Changsha, and the siege had to be lifted in 1260. Mongke, with the main forces of the Mongols, captured the rich province of Sichuan in the spring of 1258. The following year, he besieged the city of Hezhou, but died suddenly during the siege. On May 5, 1260, Kublai Khan was proclaimed great khan, but the Hulaguids and the Golden Horde did not recognize his suzerainty. During the subsequent civil war, the united Mongolian state actually collapsed, although the rivals formally recognized the supremacy of Khubilai. He retained control over Mongolia, northern and central China. Civil strife distracted the Mongols from the war with the Suns. Only in 1267 did Khubilai resume raids on South China, and at the end of 1271 he proclaimed himself emperor of the new Chinese Yuan dynasty.

In 1273, the Mongol troops managed to capture the fortresses of Fancheng and Xianyang in Hubei province. In January 1275, they were able to cross to the south bank of the Yangtze River and capture the provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, Jiangxi and Zhejiang. The Sung infantry could not withstand the onslaught of the Mongol cavalry. On February 21, 1276, the last Sung emperor, a four-year-old boy Gong Di, abdicated in favor of Khubilai in the enemy-encircled capital Ling'an. Three years later, the resistance of the last Chinese detachments in the provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangxi was crushed.

Khubilai moved the capital of the empire to Khanbaliq (Beijing). He also tried to conquer Korea, Vietnam and Burma. In 1282-1283, the Mongol troops, supported by Chinese troops, captured Burma and placed garrisons in the country. The Yuan Empire retained some degree of control over Burma until the 1330s. But the Mongols failed to establish dominance in Vietnam for a long time. In the spring of 1287, under the onslaught of a 70,000-strong Mongol-Chinese army and a fleet of 500 ships, the Vietnamese troops left Hanoi, but soon defeated the invaders and drove them out of the country. This was facilitated by the victory of the Vietnamese fleet. The Chinese fleet hastily dumped provisions into the sea and sailed to the island of Hai-nan. The Mongolian army, left without supplies, was forced to withdraw from Indochina.

In 1292-1293 an attempt was made to conquer Java. A 20,000th expeditionary force arrived here on a thousand ships. He easily coped with the troops of the Javanese princes, who were at enmity with each other. But the outbreak of a guerrilla war forced the Yunan troops to retreat to the coast, and then sail home with not too rich booty for half a million copper coins. Earlier, in 1274 and 1281, sea expeditions against the Japanese islands failed due to typhoons.

In China, the Mongols were only a small part of the population. In 1290, there were 58,835 thousand people in the Yuan Empire, of which there were no more than 2.5 million Mongols. In the time of Genghis Khan, according to some estimates, there were no more than one million Mongols. The bulk of the Chinese, as well as ordinary community members - the Mongols, lived in extreme poverty. The dominant position was occupied by the Mongolian and the Chinese aristocracy, which became close to it, as well as Muslim merchants - Uyghurs, Persians and Arabs. In 1351, an uprising of Chinese peasants and feudal lords, known as the "Red Turban Rebellion", began in Northern China. At the same time, the ideological inspirer of the uprising, Han Shan-tung, was proclaimed a descendant of the emperors of the Song dynasty, and the commander of the army, Liu Fu-tong, was proclaimed a descendant of one of the Sung commanders. In his manifesto, Han Shan-tung stated: “I hid the jasper seal (one of the symbols of imperial power. - Author) behind the eastern sea, gathered a select army in Japan, since poverty is extreme in Jingnan (China), and all wealth has accumulated to the north from the Great Wall (i.e. in Mongolia. - Auth.)”.

In 1355, the rebels revived the Song state. A significant part of the northern Chinese feudal lords opposed the Sung state and in 1357, with the support of the Mongols, created an army led by the Khitan commander Chahan Temur and the Chinese commander Li Si-chi. In 1358, when Liu Fu-tong's army laid siege to the Mongol capital of Dadu, it was the Chinese troops who saved the Mongols. But instead of Dadu, the rebels took the city of Bianliang, formerly Kaifeng, the capital of the Jin Empire, and made it their capital. However, by 1363, by the joint actions of the Mongol and those northern Chinese troops that remained loyal to the Yuan dynasty, the uprising was crushed.

In the same 1351, another uprising broke out in South China, prepared by the secret society of the White Lotus. They did not put forward the slogan of restoring the Song dynasty to power, but created their own state of Tianwan in the Yangtze Valley. In 1360, Chen Yu-liang, one of the leaders of the uprising, instead of Tianwan founded the new state of Han, which inherited the name of the ancient Chinese empire. In Central China, an uprising broke out in 1352 near the city of Haozhou and was also led by the White Lotus Society. Among the rebels here, the former Buddhist monk Zhu Yuan-zhang quickly stood out. Soon the detachment, which he led together with his father-in-law, the merchant Guo Zi-hsin, already numbered 30,000 people.

Unlike the peasant units, Zhu Yuanzhang's army did not rob the population, and representatives of all classes of society willingly joined it. In April 1356, the army of Zhu Yuanzhang (Guo Zi-hsing had died by that time) captured Jiqing (Nanjing). Then she began to destroy or annex other rebel detachments of South and Central China and oust the troops of the Mongol Yuan dynasty from there. Formally, Zhu Yuan-chang, like other participants in the uprising, recognized the emperor of the state of Song Han Lin-er, the son of Han Shan-tong, who died at the very beginning of the struggle, and received the title of commander-in-chief from him. In 1363 Zhu Yuan-chang's troops rescued Emperor Lin-er of Han from Anfyn besieged by the Mongols (Liu Fu-tong died during the siege). He moved his headquarters to the city of Chuzhou, which was under the control of Zhu Yuanzhang.

The civil strife that began in 1362 among the generals of the Yuan dynasty made it easier for the rebels. In 1367, the army of Chahan Temur and Li Si-ji was defeated by the troops of Zhu Yuan-zhang. Having lost their Chinese allies, the Mongols were forced to withdraw from China. The Mongol Yuan dynasty in China was replaced by the Chinese Ming dynasty proper, whose first emperor in 1368 was Zhu Yuan-zhang. The liberation from the Mongol yoke was the result of the creation of a unified Chinese state.

The 14th century was the century of the decline of the Mongolian states, which were increasingly fragmented and weakened militarily and economically. The Hulaguids were defeated by the Egyptian Mamluks in Syria at the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 and at Albistan in 1277. The new campaign of the Khulaguid Ilkhan Ghazan Khan, who converted to Islam, did not lead to the conquest of Syria. The Mamluks defeated the Mongols at Marj al-Suffar in 1303. The state of the Ilkhans was forced to abandon external expansion. His fall took place in 1353. The Hulaguid state, after an 18-year civil war, broke up into many small states with dynasties of Mongol, Turkic or Iranian origin. Most of the Mongols outside of Mongolia and China converted to Islam in the 14th century and became close to the Turkic peoples.

In the XIV century, the Golden Horde also weakened, in vassal dependence on which the Russian principalities were. By that time, the Mongols here mixed with the Kipchaks (Polovtsians). In Rus', as in the vast majority of other countries, the Mongols were called "Tatars". In the 1350s, the power of the khans in the Golden Horde acquired a largely nominal character. Khan Birdibek could no longer hold the north of Iran and the steppe regions of Azerbaijan. After his death, the Golden Horde began a "great jam", as the Russian chronicles called it: in 20 years, 20 khans came forward as pretenders to the throne. In the course of this civil strife, the temnik Mamai, who was married to the daughter of Birdibek, but did not himself belong to the Chingisids, came to the fore. The Golden Horde itself in 1361 actually broke up into two warring halves. Mamai retained control over the territories on the right bank of the Volga, and his opponents were the Mongolian nobility of the capital of the Golden Horde, Saray al-Jedid, on the left bank, where the puppet khans changed especially often.

In the same 1361, one of the richest uluses, Khorezm, finally seceded from the Golden Horde. It was becoming more and more difficult for the weakening state to maintain control over the lands in the East of Europe. In 1363, the Lithuanian prince Olgerd defeated the Tatar-Mongolian army in the battle on the Blue Waters (a tributary of the Southern Bug). After that, the Lithuanian lands between the Dniester and the Dnieper were freed from the Golden Horde tribute.

Over the Volga Bulgaria, Mamai was able to regain his control only in 1370, when, with the assistance of Russian troops, he planted his protege Muhammad Sultan there. During the civil wars, he captured Sarai al-Jedid several times, but failed to keep it. In 1375, Khan Tokhtamysh, who came from Kok-Orda, who occupied the territory near the Syr Darya River, joined the struggle for the Golden Horde throne. In 1375, he captured Saray al-Jedid and held it until 1378, when he transferred power to Prince Arabshah, who came with him from Kok-Orda.

On August 2, 1377, Arabshah (Arapsha in Russian chronicles) defeated the Russian army on the Pyan River. It was commanded by the son of the Suzdal-Nizhny Novgorod prince Dmitry Konstantinovich, Prince Ivan Konstantinovich. Arapsha secretly approached the Russian camp when a feast was in full swing there. Prince Ivan and his men thought that the enemy was far away, and took off their chain mail and helmets in order to properly relax. They did not have time to get to the weapons lying on the carts and were almost all killed or, together with the prince, drowned in the river. After this victory, the Tatars plundered Nizhny Novgorod and the territory of the Nizhny Novgorod and Ryazan principalities.

In the winter of 1377/78, the Moscow prince Dmitry Ivanovich, son-in-law of Dmitry Konstantinovich, made a campaign against the Mordovian princes, who were suspected of letting Arapsha through their lands to Pyana. This already affected the territory subject to Mamai. In the summer of 1378, he sent an army to Rus' under the command of Murza Begich. On the territory of the Ryazan Principality near the Vozha River, on August 11, 1378, the army of the Moscow prince, reinforced by the squads of the Pronsk, Ryazan and Polotsk princes, destroyed Begich's army, and Murza himself died. After that, a clash with the main forces of Mamai became inevitable.

Historians have long noticed that the beginning of the Battle of Kulikovo is described in sufficient detail in the surviving sources, but its culmination and finale are drawn in purely folklore colors, so it is not possible to establish the real course of events from these sources. No wonder the most famous literary work of the Kulikovo cycle "Zadonshchina" basically repeats the more ancient epic "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". And in some ways the course of the Battle of Kulikovo, both in chronicles and in epic legends, resembles the course of the battle that took place on the shores of Lake Peipus between the army of Prince Alexander Nevsky and the Livonian knights. In the Battle of the Ice, a strong detachment of Russian troops also hit the rear of the enemy and turned them into a disorderly flight. Then the Russians got not only rich booty, but also a considerable number of prisoners: 50 eminent knights, “deliberate governors”, and an even greater number of less noble knights and ordinary warriors, knechts. The number of participants in the Battle of Kulikovo was many times greater than the number of troops in the battle on Lake Peipsi. This means that the Russian prisoners during the defeat of Mamai should have captured not tens and hundreds, but thousands. After all, Mamaev’s troops included a lot of infantry, which, in the event of a defeat, had no chance of escaping from the Russian cavalry. The chronicles say that the infantry at Mamai was made up of "Besermens, and Armens, and Fryazis, Cherkassy, ​​and Yasy, and Bourtases."

We will not now understand what kind of peoples are meant by the Cherkasy, Yasy and Burtases. In this case, we are interested in the Fryazi - the Genoese, because their participation in the battle is directly related to the further fate of the Tatar leader. As Karamzin notes, some peoples served Mamai "as subjects, others as mercenaries." The Genoese, for example, had a long-standing agreement with the Golden Horde, according to which, in exchange for military assistance, the Genoese colonists and merchants were guaranteed the right to free trade in the Crimea and personal security. But it is hard to imagine that both mercenaries and vassal subjects would fight for Mamai to the last drop of blood. Moreover, we remember how easily the Mamaev army left the unsuccessful commander and went over to Tokhtamysh. And what was the reason for the same Genoese to be afraid of Russian captivity and prefer death on the battlefield to him? After all, they could well count on a ransom from their rich compatriots. And what was the reason for Dmitry's soldiers not to take prisoners? After all, prisoners could be paid a considerable ransom or, having been turned into slaves, sold in slave markets. And someone and accept the Russian service. However, not only chronicles and legends are silent about the prisoners, although the booty captured from the Tatars is listed in detail there. None of the known Russian pedigrees goes back to people who could be considered captives of the Kulikovo field. Although the same Tatar murzas, immigrants from the Caucasus and the Genoese, both before 1380 and after, often entered the Russian service, and this was reflected in the genealogies of the Russian nobility. Therefore, there were no prisoners in the Battle of Kulikovo? Why?

I think this is the only plausible explanation. In fact, the Battle of Kulikovo took place as follows. At first, the Tatar army went on the attack and pressed the Russian regiments. However, at the height of the battle, Mamai received news of the appearance in his possessions of the army of Tokhtamysh, who had previously subjugated the eastern half of the Golden Horde. The chronicler of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery knows about the arrival of Tokhtamysh already at the end of September 1380. It is likely that this disturbing news reached Mamaia even earlier, right on the day of the Battle of Kulikovo, September 8th. If my assumption is correct, then everything falls into place. The movement of Tokhtamysh to the western, Mamaev part of the Golden Horde made it meaningless for Mamai to continue the Battle of Kulikovo. Even a victory over the Russian army would lead to heavy losses of Mamaev's army and would make it powerless to repel Tokhtamysh's attack. There was no need to think about a campaign against Rus'. Mamai saw the only way out in withdrawing the bulk of his troops from the battle as soon as possible and turning them against a formidable opponent. But getting out of the fight is not an easy task. The retreat of the main forces had to be covered by the rearguard. As such a rearguard, Mamai left all his infantry, which still had little chance of getting away from the Russian pursuit. And so that the mercenary infantrymen would not be tempted to surrender ahead of time, when they realize the hopelessness of their situation, the commander gave them a fairly large detachment of cavalry. The presence of Tatar cavalry supported the illusion among the Genoese infantrymen that the battle was continuing according to the previous plan. The Tatars, on the other hand, did not allow the infantry to surrender and did not surrender themselves, hoping to break through in the cavalry at the end of the battle. When all the infantry died, the rearguard cavalry partly died during the breakthrough, partly managed to escape. That is why there were no prisoners on the Kulikovo field.

True, for Dmitry Donskoy this victory turned out to be pyrrhic. According to the most reliable data of the "first Russian historian" V.N. Tatishchev, the number of Russian rati on the Kulikovo field was about 60 thousand people. The number of Mamai's troops can be determined based on the following considerations. In 1385, Tokhtamysh gathered an army of 90 thousand people from all over the territory of the Golden Horde to march on Tabriz. Mamai, who dominated only in the western half of the state, obviously could mobilize about half as many people - up to 45 thousand soldiers. If we assume that in the Battle of Kulikovo both sides lost, say, 15 thousand each, then Dmitry should have had 45 thousand fighters left, while Tokhtamysh, who had annexed Mamai's army, had up to 75 thousand troops. That is why the Khan succeeded two years later with comparative ease in defeating the Russians and burning down Moscow. In addition to the numerical superiority, it must be taken into account that the militia warriors were inferior in combat experience to the professional warriors of the Horde.

It was necessary to somehow explain the miraculous retreat of Mamai from the battlefield. So the legend of the ambush regiment appeared in the annals, as if deciding the outcome of the Battle of Kulikovo.

But the fate of Mamai was already predetermined. The army that remained with him preferred to go to the more successful Tokhtamysh. Mamai had no choice but to seek refuge in the Genoese Café. Here he really had to hide his name. However, the Genoese of Mamai recognized and stabbed him in revenge for the senseless death of his compatriots on the Kulikovo field. And don't feel too sorry for him. The "evil end" of Mamai was predetermined by his whole life. After all, the mighty temnik did nothing good. There was nothing in his life except predatory campaigns. Sooner or later, Mamai had to die from the opponent's sword, from the dagger of one of his victims or offended accomplices.

In 1381 Tokhtamysh made a campaign against Iran, and in 1382 he decided to deal with Dmitry Donskoy. Khan demanded to pay tribute in the amount in which it existed before the start of the "great jam". Having been refused, the Tatars invaded the Russian lands and went to Moscow. Prince Dmitry, realizing the overwhelming superiority of the enemy forces, did not dare to fight Tokhtamysh in an open field or sit down with the main forces in a siege in Moscow. The conqueror of Mamai retreated to Kostroma, retaining a faint hope that, relying on stone walls, the Moscow garrison would withstand the siege. But Tokhtamysh captured Moscow in just four days, either by attack or by deceit. According to the chronicles, the Muscovites allegedly believed the promises of the khan, backed up by the assurances of the Suzdal princes who were under Tokhtamysh, that he would limit himself to only a small tribute, and would not touch the city. Such naivety of the inhabitants of Moscow seems completely unrealistic. In Rus', it was too well known what happens to the city, where the Tatars entered. Rather, it should be assumed that the attack undertaken by Tokhtamysh, which, according to the chroniclers, was unsuccessful, actually ended in the capture of the city. The Tatars drove the defenders off the walls with a hail of arrows, and the garrison was probably too small to protect the city walls around the perimeter. In total, in Moscow, during the massacre organized by the Tatars, from 12 to 24 thousand people died, and thousands more Muscovites were taken into slavery. Then the army of Tokht-mysh captured and plundered Vladimir, Pereyaslavl, Yuryev, Zvenigorod and Mozhaisk. On the way back to the Horde, the Tatars heavily devastated the lands of the Ryazan principality. Prince Dmitry was forced to agree to pay tribute in the same amount and went to the Khan's headquarters to receive a label for a great reign.

Tokhtamysh temporarily strengthened the Golden Horde. But in 1391, Tamerlane (Timur) defeated the Golden Horde army in the battle for the Volga south of the Kama. In 1395, Tokhtamysh suffered an even more severe defeat from the Iron Lame. Timur's army invaded the possessions of Tokhtamysh's ally, Prince Vasily I of Moscow, laid siege to Yelets, but then, for some unknown reason, turned back. Vasily continued to collect Russian lands, and after the defeat of Tokhtamysh, civil strife arose in the Horde, until at the very end of the 14th century the uluses were again united under the rule of Timur's protege Khan Shadibek. At the same time, the actual power belonged to the temnik Edigei. In 1408 he made a campaign against Moscow, which stopped paying tribute after the defeat of Tokhtamysh. The Tatars did not take the capitals, having received the required payoff, but limited themselves to the ruin of Vladimir and some other cities. Then a new civil strife began in the Horde, which ended with the death of Edigey in 1420. After that, the Golden Horde was no longer reborn as a single state. The Siberian, Kazan, Crimean and Astrakhan khanates and the Nogai Horde emerged from it.

The successor of the Golden Horde in relation to Rus' was the Great Horde, which occupied the territory between the Volga and the Dniester, as well as part of the North Caucasus. The complete liberation of Rus' from Horde dependence was delayed by an internecine war between the successors of Prince Vasily I, who died in 1425. His son Vasily II, on the one hand, and the Zvenigorod-Galician prince Yuri Dmitrievich and his sons, on the other, fought for the grand-ducal table.

On July 7, 1445, the sons of Kazan Khan Ulu-Mukhammed Mumutyak and Yegup destroyed the army of Vasily II in the battle near Suzdal. The Grand Duke himself was captured, from where he was released for a gigantic ransom of 200 thousand rubles at that time. This ransom also covered tribute arrears from previous years. Vasily II was forced to agree to the further payment of tribute. The following year, 1446, Prince Dmitry Shemyaka, the son of Yuri Dmitrievich, captured Moscow and blinded Vasily. Later, however, Shemyaka was defeated, and Vasily II the Dark in 1447 again became the Grand Duke. Civil strife in Rus' ended only with the death in 1453 of Dmitry Shemyaka, from whom the synonym for judicial arbitrariness remained in Russian - Shemyakin Court.

During the civil strife, Rus' repeatedly fell victim to raids by various heirs of the Golden Horde. So, on July 2, 1451, the army of the Nogai prince Mazovsha burned most of Moscow, but could not capture the Kremlin. Soon after the end of the internecine war, the Tver, Nizhny Novgorod and Ryazan principalities recognized their dependence on Moscow.

By the end of 1477, the son of Vasily II, Ivan III, as a result of several campaigns, subjugated Novgorod the Great to Moscow. In the 1470s, he no longer paid the “exit” (tribute) to the Tatars, which in 1480 caused a campaign against Rus' by Khan of the Great Horde Akhmat. On October 8, 1480, Akhmat's army came to the banks of the Ugra River. On the other side stood the army of Ivan III. The Tatars made an attempt to cross, but were repulsed. However, the big battle did not take place. Akhmat expected the approach of his ally - the Lithuanian prince and the Polish king Casimir IV, but at that time he was forced to repel the attack on his possessions by the Crimean Khan Mengli Giray. Having stood at the Ugra until November 11 and severely suffering from frost and lack of fodder and food, the Horde army retreated home. At the beginning of 1481, Akhmat died in a battle with the Nogais.

The Mongol-Tatar yoke in Rus' was finally eliminated. This happened later than in all other countries captured by the Mongols. The reason for this delay lay in the relatively late acquisition of state unity by Russia around Moscow. The process of unification of Russian lands went in parallel with the collapse of the Golden Horde. Both of these processes reached a critical point and became irreversible only in the last quarter of the 15th century. Then there was an almost bloodless fall of the yoke

If all lies are removed from history, this does not mean at all that only the truth will remain - as a result, nothing may remain at all.

Stanislav Jerzy Lec

The Tatar-Mongol invasion began in 1237 with the invasion of Batu's cavalry into the Ryazan lands, and ended in 1242. The result of these events was a two-century yoke. So they say in the textbooks, but in fact the relationship between the Horde and Russia was much more complicated. In particular, the famous historian Gumilyov speaks about this. In this material, we will briefly consider the issues of the invasion of the Mongol-Tatar army from the point of view of the generally accepted interpretation, and also consider the controversial issues of this interpretation. Our task is not to offer for the thousandth time a fantasy about medieval society, but to provide our readers with facts. Conclusions are everyone's business.

The beginning of the invasion and background

For the first time, the troops of Rus' and the Horde met on May 31, 1223 in the battle on Kalka. The Russian troops were led by the Kiev prince Mstislav, and Subedei and Juba opposed them. The Russian army was not only defeated, it was actually destroyed. There are many reasons for this, but all of them are discussed in the article about the battle on Kalka. Returning to the first invasion, it took place in two stages:

• 1237-1238 - a campaign against the eastern and northern lands of Rus'.
• 1239-1242 - a campaign in the southern lands, which led to the establishment of a yoke.

Invasion of 1237-1238

In 1236, the Mongols launched another campaign against the Polovtsians. In this campaign, they achieved great success and in the second half of 1237 approached the borders of the Ryazan principality. The commander of the Asian cavalry was Batu Khan (Batu Khan), the grandson of Genghis Khan. He had 150,000 people under him. Subedey, who was familiar with the Russians from previous clashes, participated in the campaign with him.

Map of the Tatar-Mongol invasion

The invasion took place at the beginning of the winter of 1237. It is impossible to establish the exact date here, since it is unknown. Moreover, some historians say that the invasion did not take place in the winter, but in the late autumn of the same year. With great speed, the Mongols' cavalry moved around the country, conquering one city after another:

• Ryazan - fell at the end of December 1237. The siege lasted 6 days.
• Moscow - fell in January 1238. The siege lasted 4 days. This event was preceded by the Battle of Kolomna, where Yuri Vsevolodovich with his army tried to stop the enemy, but was defeated.
• Vladimir - fell in February 1238. The siege lasted 8 days.

After the capture of Vladimir, virtually all the eastern and northern lands were in the hands of Batu. He conquered one city after another (Tver, Yuriev, Suzdal, Pereslavl, Dmitrov). In early March, Torzhok fell, thus opening the way for the Mongol army to the north, to Novgorod. But Batu made a different maneuver and instead of marching on Novgorod, he deployed his troops and went to storm Kozelsk. The siege went on for 7 weeks, ending only when the Mongols went to the trick. They announced that they would accept the surrender of the Kozelsk garrison and let everyone go alive. People believed and opened the gates of the fortress. Batu did not keep his word and gave the order to kill everyone. Thus ended the first campaign and the first invasion of the Tatar-Mongolian army into Rus'.

Invasion of 1239-1242

After a break of a year and a half, in 1239 a new invasion of Rus' by the troops of Batu Khan began. This year based events took place in Pereyaslav and Chernihiv. The sluggishness of Batu's offensive is due to the fact that at that time he was actively fighting the Polovtsy, in particular in the Crimea.

In the autumn of 1240, Batu led his army under the walls of Kyiv. The ancient capital of Rus' could not resist for a long time. The city fell on December 6, 1240. Historians note the special brutality with which the invaders behaved. Kyiv was almost completely destroyed. There is nothing left of the city.

Mongol conquests (13th century)

The Kyiv that we know today has nothing in common with the ancient capital (except for its geographical location). After these events, the invading army split up:

• Part went to Vladimir-Volynsky.
• Part went to Galich.

Having captured these cities, the Mongols went on a European campaign, but we are of little interest in it.

The consequences of the Tatar-Mongol invasion of Rus'

The consequences of the invasion of the Asian army in Rus' are described by historians unambiguously:

• The country was cut, and became completely dependent on the Golden Horde.
• Rus' began to pay tribute to the winners every year (in money and people).
• The country fell into a stupor in terms of progress and development due to an unbearable yoke.

This list can be continued, but, in general, it all comes down to the fact that all the problems that were in Rus' at that time were written off as a yoke.

This is how, briefly, the Tatar-Mongol invasion appears from the point of view of official history and what we are told in textbooks. In contrast, we will consider Gumilyov's arguments, and also ask a number of simple, but very important questions to understand the current issues and the fact that with the yoke, as well as with relations between Rus' and the Horde, everything is much more complex than it is customary to say.

For example, it is absolutely incomprehensible and inexplicable how a nomadic people, who several decades ago still lived in a tribal system, created a huge empire and conquered half the world. After all, considering the invasion of Rus', we are considering only the tip of the iceberg. The empire of the Golden Horde was much larger: from the Pacific to the Adriatic, from Vladimir to Burma. Giant countries were conquered: Rus', China, India ... Neither before nor after, no one was able to create a military machine that could conquer so many countries. And the Mongols could ...

To understand how difficult it was (if not to say that it was impossible), let's look at the situation with China (so as not to be accused of looking for a conspiracy around Rus'). The population of China at the time of Genghis Khan was approximately 50 million people. No one conducted a census of the Mongols, but, for example, today this nation has 2 million people. If we take into account that the number of all the peoples of the Middle Ages is increasing by now, then the Mongols were less than 2 million people (including women, the elderly and children). How did they manage to conquer China of 50 million inhabitants? And then also India and Russia ...

The strangeness of the geography of movement of Batu

Let's return to the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Rus'. What were the goals of this trip? Historians talk about the desire to plunder the country and subdue it. It also states that all these goals have been achieved. But this is not entirely true, because in ancient Rus' there were 3 richest cities:

• Kyiv is one of the largest cities in Europe and the ancient capital of Rus'. The city was conquered by the Mongols and destroyed.
• Novgorod is the largest trading city and the richest in the country (hence its special status). Generally not affected by the invasion.
• Smolensk, also a trading city, was considered equal in wealth to Kyiv. The city also did not see the Mongol-Tatar army.

So it turns out that 2 of the 3 largest cities did not suffer from the invasion at all. Moreover, if we consider plunder as a key aspect of Batu's invasion of Rus', then the logic is not traced at all. Judge for yourself, Batu takes Torzhok (he spends 2 weeks on the assault). This is the poorest city, whose task is to protect Novgorod. But after that, the Mongols do not go to the North, which would be logical, but turn to the south. Why was it necessary to spend 2 weeks on Torzhok, which no one needs, just to turn south? Historians give two explanations, logical at first glance:

• Near Torzhok, Batu lost many soldiers and was afraid to go to Novgorod. This explanation could well be considered logical if not for one "but". Since Batu lost a lot of his army, then he needs to leave Rus' to replenish his troops or take a break. But instead, the khan rushes to storm Kozelsk. Here, by the way, the losses were huge and as a result, the Mongols hastily left Rus'. But why they did not go to Novgorod is not clear.
• The Tatar-Mongols were afraid of the spring flood of the rivers (it was in March). Even in modern conditions, March in the north of Russia is not distinguished by a mild climate and you can safely move around there. And if we talk about 1238, then climatologists call that era the Little Ice Age, when winters were much harsher than modern ones and in general the temperature is much lower (this is easy to check). That is, it turns out that in the era of global warming in March, Novgorod can be reached, and in the era of the ice age, everyone was afraid of river floods.

With Smolensk, the situation is also paradoxical and inexplicable. Having taken Torzhok, Batu set off to storm Kozelsk. This is a simple fortress, a small and very poor city. The Mongols stormed it for 7 weeks, lost thousands of people killed. What was it for? There was no benefit from the capture of Kozelsk - there is no money in the city, there are no food depots either. Why such sacrifices? But just 24 hours of cavalry movement from Kozelsk is Smolensk - the richest city in Rus', but the Mongols do not even think of moving towards it.

Surprisingly, all these logical questions are simply ignored by official historians. Standard excuses are given, they say, who knows these savages, that's how they decided for themselves. But such an explanation does not stand up to scrutiny.

Nomads never howl in winter

There is another remarkable fact that the official history simply bypasses, because. it is impossible to explain it. Both Tatar-Mongolian invasions were committed to Rus' in winter (or started in late autumn). But these are nomads, and nomads start fighting only in the spring to finish the battles before winter. After all, they move on horses that need to be fed. Can you imagine how you can feed the many thousands of Mongolian army in snowy Russia? Historians, of course, say that this is a trifle and you should not even consider such issues, but the success of any operation directly depends on the provision:

• Charles 12 was unable to organize the provision of his army - he lost Poltava and the Northern War.
• Napoleon was unable to establish security and left Russia with a half-starved army, which was absolutely incapable of combat.
• Hitler, according to many historians, managed to establish security for only 60-70% - he lost the Second World War.

And now, understanding all this, let's see what the Mongol army was like. It is noteworthy, but there is no definite figure for its quantitative composition. Historians give figures from 50 thousand to 400 thousand horsemen. For example, Karamzin speaks of the 300,000th army of Batu. Let's look at the provision of the army using this figure as an example. As you know, the Mongols always went on military campaigns with three horses: riding (the rider moved on it), pack (carried the rider's personal belongings and weapons) and combat (went empty so that at any moment she could fresh into battle). That is, 300 thousand people is 900 thousand horses. Add to this the horses that carried the ram guns (it is known for certain that the Mongols brought the guns assembled), the horses that carried food for the army, carried additional weapons, etc. It turns out, according to the most conservative estimates, 1.1 million horses! Now imagine how to feed such a herd in a foreign country in a snowy winter (during the Little Ice Age)? The answer is no, because it can't be done.

So how many armies did Dad have?

It is noteworthy, but the closer to our time there is a study of the invasion of the Tatar-Mongolian army, the smaller the number is obtained. For example, the historian Vladimir Chivilikhin speaks of 30 thousand who moved separately, because they could not feed themselves in a single army. Some historians lower this figure even lower - up to 15 thousand. And here we come across an insoluble contradiction:

• If there really were so many Mongols (200-400 thousand), then how could they feed themselves and their horses in the harsh Russian winter? The cities did not surrender to them in peace in order to take provisions from them, most of the fortresses were burned.
• If the Mongols were really only 30-50 thousand, then how did they manage to conquer Rus'? After all, each principality fielded an army in the region of 50 thousand against Batu. If there were really so few Mongols and if they acted independently, the remnants of the horde and Batu himself would have been buried near Vladimir. But in reality, everything was different.

We invite the reader to look for conclusions and answers to these questions on their own. For our part, we did the main thing - we pointed out the facts that completely refute the official version of the invasion of the Mongol-Tatars. At the end of the article, I want to note another important fact that the whole world has recognized, including official history, but this fact is hushed up and published in few places. The main document, according to which the yoke and invasion were studied for many years, is the Laurentian Chronicle. But, as it turned out, the truth of this document raises big questions. Official history admitted that 3 pages of the annals (which speak of the beginning of the yoke and the beginning of the Mongol invasion of Rus') have been changed and are not original. I wonder how many more pages from the history of Russia have been changed in other chronicles, and what actually happened? But it's almost impossible to answer this question...

Mongol conquests at 13

Mongol conquests in the 13th century, a series of major wars of conquest and individual campaigns organized by the Mongol feudal lords with the aim of seizing military booty, enslaving and robbing the peoples of Asia and East. Europe. The Mongol feudal lords, having created a military organization, involved the majority of the people in wars of conquest. The main strength of their army was a numerous and very mobile cavalry, consisting of nomadic arats. The Mongol feudal lords also used the military forces of the conquered countries and their technical achievements (for example, siege weapons) in campaigns. The army had a unified command, strong discipline, was well armed and surpassed the feudal militias of neighboring countries in their fighting qualities. Success M. h. contributed to internal strife and betrayal of the ruling elite in many countries of Asia and Eastern Europe.

M. h. began after the formation of the Mongolian early feudal state headed by Genghis Khan (ruled 1206-27) and continued with short interruptions until the end of the 13th century. In 1207-11 the peoples of Siberia and East Turkestan were subjugated: Buryats, Yakuts, Oirots, Kirghiz, Uighurs; campaigns were undertaken against the Tangut state of Xi-Xia (finally defeated by 1227). In 1211, an offensive began against the Jurchen state of Jin (Northern China). Mongol detachments destroyed about 90 cities and in 1215 took Peking (Yanjing). By 1217, all the lands north of the river had been conquered. Huanghe. In 1218 the power of the Mong. feudal lords spread to Semirechye.

In 1219 Mong. an army of over 150 thousand people. led by Genghis Khan invaded Central Asia. Khorezmshah Mohammed dispersed the army over the fortified cities, which made it easier for the Mongols to conquer their possessions. Mongolian detachments took Otrar, Khujand, Urgench and other cities. Bukhara and Samarkand surrendered without a fight. Mohammed fled and soon died on one of the islands of the Caspian Sea. In 1221, the conquest of Central Asia was completed with the capture of Khorezm. Military operations were transferred to the territory of modern Afghanistan, where the son of the Khorezmshah, Jalal-ad-din, continued to fight. Genghis Khan pursued him to the river. Indus and defeated on November 24, 1221. By 1225 the main Mongol army had gone to Mongolia. Only the 30,000-strong detachment of the Mongol commanders Jebe and Subedei continued the war in the west.

Through Northern Iran, the Mongol detachment broke into Transcaucasia, devastated part of Georgia and Azerbaijan, penetrated the lands of the Alans along the Caspian Sea (1222) and, having defeated them, went out into the Polovtsian steppes. In the battle on the river Kalka On May 31, 1223, the Mongol detachment defeated the combined Russian-Polovtsian army, pursued it to the river. Dnieper, and then retreated to the middle Volga, but, having been defeated in Bulgaria, the Volga-Kama, returned to Mongolia (1224). It was a deep reconnaissance raid of the Mongol cavalry, preparing a future campaign to the west.

After the kurultai of 1229, who elected Ogedei as the Great Khan, M. z.

went in two directions. The conquest of northern China (1231–34) was completed in East and the war with Korea (1231–32) began. Most of Korea was conquered by 1273 after a series of large campaigns of the Mongol army (1236, 1254, 1255, 1259). In 1229 to the river. Yaik approached Subedei with 30,000 troops. Together with the army of Batu, the ruler of the Jochi ulus, he managed to oust the Saksins and Polovtsians from the Caspian steppes. In 1232, the Mongol army tried to invade the Volga-Kama Bulgaria, but was repulsed. The Bashkirs also continued to fight against the conquerors. The offensive to the west by the forces of one ulus of Jochi failed.

At kurultai 1235, it was decided to send "to help and reinforce Batu" the military forces of other uluses. 14 Genghis Khans participated in the campaign, the general Mongol army reached 150 thousand people. In the autumn of 1236, the Mongol army again invaded the Volga-Kama Bulgaria and defeated it, in the spring and summer of 1237 it continued to fight the Alans, Polovtsians and the peoples of the Middle Volga region, and in the fall they concentrated in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bmodern Voronezh to march on North-Eastern Rus'. At the beginning of the winter of 1237, Batu attacked the Ryazan principality and defeated the squads of local princes. On December 21, after a six-day assault, Ryazan fell. The heroism of the defenders of the Ryazan land is glorified in the legend of Evpaty Kolovrat. In January 1238, Vladimir squads were defeated near Kolomna, trying to detain Batu near the borders of the Vladimir principality. The Mongolian army destroyed Kolomna, Moscow, and on February 4 laid siege to Vladimir. The Grand Duke of Vladimir Yuri Vsevolodovich "with a small squad" went beyond the Volga, to the river. Sit (a tributary of the Mologa), where he began to gather a new army. On February 5, the Mongol detachment ravaged Suzdal, and on February 7, after a fierce assault, Vladimir was taken. After that, Batu divided the army into several large detachments, which went along the main river routes to the north-east, north and north-west. and took in February 1238 14 Russian cities (Rostov, Uglich, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Kashin, Ksnyatin, Gorodets, Galich-Mersky, Pereyaslavl-Zalessky, Yuryev, Dmitrov, Volok-Lamsky, Tver, Torzhok). On March 4, the army of the Mongol commander Burundai surrounded and destroyed the grand ducal regiments on the river. City; Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich also died in this battle. The entire interfluve of the Oka and the Volga was devastated by the Mongols. A small detachment of the Mongol cavalry raided the north and returned 100 km short of Novgorod. When retreating to the steppes, the Mongol army marched in a wide front of small detachments, "round up", once again devastating the Russian lands. Kozelsk offered stubborn resistance to the enemy, which the Mongol army besieged for 7 weeks, suffering heavy losses.

In the Polovtsian steppes (summer 1238 - autumn 1240), the Mongol army waged a protracted war with the Polovtsians and Alans, made campaigns in the Crimea, in the Mordovian land, where an uprising against the conquerors rose, in Pereyaslavl-South and Chernigov (1239). In the autumn of 1240, a campaign against South Rus' began. At the end of December, after a multi-day assault, Kyiv fell. Mongolian troops took and destroyed Vladimir-Volynsky, Galich and other cities. However, Danilov, Kremenets and Kholm fought off all the attacks of the Mongol army. In the spring of 1241, the Mongol army, although significantly weakened by the heroic resistance of the Russian people and other peoples of Eastern Europe, nevertheless advanced further to the west.

The main forces of Batu through the Carpathian passes broke into Hungary, the 60,000-strong army of King Bela IV was defeated in the battle of Shaio (April 11, 1241). The capital of Hungary - the city of Pest was taken and destroyed, a significant part of the country was devastated. Another Mongol detachment invaded Poland, defeated the militia of Polish and German princes near Legnica. The Polish, Moravian and Slovak lands were devastated. Separate Mongol detachments penetrated as far as East Bohemia, but were repulsed by King Wenceslas I. At the end of 1241, all Mongol troops concentrated in Hungary, where the masses continued to fight the conquerors. It was not possible to gain a foothold in the Hungarian steppes for a further offensive on Z. Batu, and he moved through Austria and Croatia to the Adriatic Sea. In the autumn of 1242, after an unsuccessful siege of coastal fortresses, Batu began to retreat through Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria. The Mongol invasion of Central Europe ended.

Somewhat longer were M. h. to the west - in Asia Minor and the Middle East. After the conquest of Transcaucasia (1236), the Mongol army defeated the Rum Sultanate. In 1256 Hulagu conquered Iran and Mesopotamia, in 1258 Baghdad, the capital of the Arab Caliphate, fell. Mongol troops penetrated into Syria, preparing to invade Egypt, but in 1260 they were defeated by the Egyptian sultan. M. h. Z. ended.

In the 2nd half of the 13th c. M. h. were sent to the countries of East and Southeast Asia. Mongolian troops captured the countries surrounding the South Sung Empire: the state of Dali (1252-53), Tibet (1253). In 1258, Mongol troops invaded South China from various sides, but the unexpected death of the Great Khan Möngke (1259) delayed the conquest of the South Sung Empire. Southern China was conquered by the new Great Khan Kublai Khan in 1267-79. In 1281, the Mongol feudal lords tried to conquer Japan by sending 1,000 ships with a 100,000-strong army to its shores, but the fleet was destroyed by a typhoon. The expansion in Southeast Asia did not bring success to the Mongol feudal lords, although they used the Chinese army and navy in their campaigns. Mongol-Chinese troops after several campaigns (1277 - twice, 1282, 1287) occupied Burma, but were soon expelled (1291). Mongol-Chinese troops and fleet repeatedly attacked Vietnam (1257, 1258, 1284, 1285, 1287-88), but failed to subdue the Vietnamese people. The state of Tjampu (in the southeast of Indochina) also defended its independence. The attempt to conquer Fr. Java, although large forces were sent there (1,000 ships with a 70,000-strong army).

M. h. ended with a campaign of 1300 in Burma. After that, the Mongol feudal lords stopped active hostilities and switched to the systematic exploitation of the conquered countries, using the Chinese management experience and the Chinese administration.

M. h. brought disaster to the peoples of Asia and Eastern Europe. They were accompanied by the mass extermination of the population, the devastation of vast territories, the destruction of cities, the decline of agricultural culture, especially in areas of irrigated agriculture. M. h. for a long time delayed the socio-economic and cultural development of the countries that became part of the Mongol feudal empire.

Lit .: Tatar-Mongols in Asia and Europe. Sat. Art., M., 1970; Bartold V.V., Turkestan in the era of the Mongol invasion, Soch., vol. 1, M., 1963; Kargalov VV, Foreign policy factors in the development of feudal Rus'. Feudal Rus' and nomads, M., 1967; Grekov B. D., Yakubovsky A. Yu., Golden Horde and its fall, M. - L., 1950; Merpert N. Ya., Pashuto V. T., Cherepnin L. V., Genghis Khan and his legacy, "History of the USSR", 1962, No. 5.

V. V. Kargalov.

Mongol conquests in the 13th century

The Mongol detachments, united by Genghis Khan, conquered the neighboring peoples - the Yenisei Kirghiz, Buryats, Yakuts and Uighurs, defeated the civilization of Primorye, and by 1215 conquered Northern China.

Mongol conquests in the 13th century

Here, the Mongol generals adopted siege equipment from Chinese engineers to storm the fortresses. In 1218, the commanders of Genghis Khan conquered Korea, and the next year, an army of 200,000 attacked the cities of Khorezm. During two years of hostilities, the agricultural regions of Semirechye were turned into pastures, most of the inhabitants were destroyed, and the artisans were taken into slavery. In 1221, Genghis Khan subdued all of Central Asia. After this campaign, Genghis Khan Divided his huge power into uluses.

In the spring of 1223 A 30,000-strong detachment of Mongols led by Jebe and Subedei, having passed along the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, invaded Transcaucasia. Having defeated the Armenian-Georgian army and devastated Georgia and Azerbaijan, the invaders broke through the Derbent passage to the North Caucasus and defeated the Alans and Polovtsians.

The Mongol-Tatars were able to conquer the states that were at the highest stage of development, because:

1) excellent organization of the troops (decimal system)

2) borrowing military equipment from the Chinese

3) the number of troops

4) well-organized intelligence

5) rigidity in relation to the resisting cities (they destroyed the recalcitrant cities, burned, destroyed, and the inhabitants were either taken away into captivity (artisans, women, children), or exterminated). Consequently, the cities surrendered voluntarily.

6) psychological factors (use of sound elements).

Battle of the Kalka (1223)

The Polovtsians, led by Khan Kotyan, centuries-old enemies of Rus', turned to the Russian princes for help against the Mongol-Tatars. At the initiative of Mstislav Mstislavich Udaly (Prince of Galicia, was married to the daughter of Khan Kotyan), at the congress of South Russian princes in Kyiv, it was decided to come to the aid of the Polovtsy. A large Russian army led by the three strongest princes of Southern Rus' entered the steppe: Mstislav Romanovich of Kyiv, Mstislav Svyatoslavich of Chernigov and Mstislav Mstislavovich of Galicia. In the lower reaches of the Dnieper, it united with the Polovtsian forces. On May 31, 1223, a battle took place near the Sea of ​​Azov, on the Kalka River, in which the Russian-Polovtsian army was defeated as a result of uncoordinated actions and intra-princely strife: against the enemy, Mstislav of Kiev stood with his forces on one of the hills and did not participate in the battle. The Mongols managed to withstand the blow, and then went on the offensive. The Polovtsy, who fled from the battlefield, were the first to be defeated. This put the Galician and Volyn rati in a difficult position. The Mongols broke the resistance of the Russians.

Now it was the turn of the most powerful part of the Russian army - the Kyiv rati. An attempt to take the Russian camp by attack, the Mongols failed, and then they went to the trick. Dzhebe and Subede promised Mstislav of Kyiv and other princes peace and the passage of their troops to their homeland. When the princes opened their camp and left it, the Mongols rushed to the Russian squads. All Russian soldiers were captured.

During the battle on the Kalka, 6 princes died, only every tenth of the soldiers returned. Only the Kiev army lost about 10 thousand people. This defeat turned out to be one of the most difficult for Rus' in history.

Batu's invasion of Rus'

In 1227, the founder of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan, died. The ulus of the eldest son of Jochi, who died in the same year as his father, Dostal to the grandson of the conqueror - Batu Khan (Batu). It is this ulus, located west of the river. The Irtysh was supposed to become the main springboard for the aggressive campaign to the West.

In 1235, at the next kurultai of the Mongol nobility in Karakorum, a decision was made on a general Mongol campaign in Europe. The forces of one ulus of Jochi were not enough. Therefore, troops of other Genghisids were sent to help Batu. Batu himself was put at the head of the campaign, and the experienced commander Subedei was appointed adviser.

The offensive began in the autumn of 1236, and a year later the Mongol conquerors conquered the Volga Bulgaria, as well as the Polovtsian hordes that roamed between the Volga and Don rivers.

Late autumn 1237. the main forces of Batu were concentrated in the upper reaches of the river. Voronezh for the invasion of North-Eastern Rus'. In Rus', they knew about the formidable danger, but the princely feuds prevented them from joining forces to repel a strong and treacherous enemy. There was no unified command. Fortifications of cities were erected to defend neighboring Russian principalities, and not from the steppe nomads. The princely cavalry squads were not inferior to the Mongol noyons and nukers in terms of armament and fighting qualities. But the bulk of the Russian army was made up of the militia - urban and rural warriors, inferior to the Mongols in weapons and combat skills.

The defeat of Ryazan

The first principality to undergo ruthless ruin was the Ryazan land. The sovereign Russian princes had nothing to oppose to this invasion. Princely feuds did not allow united forces to be put up against Batu. The princes of Vladimir and Chernigov refused to help Ryazan. Approaching the Ryazan land, Batu demanded from the Ryazan princes a tenth of "everything that is in your land."

In the hope of reaching an agreement with Batu, the Ryazan prince sent an embassy to him with rich gifts, which was headed by the prince's son Fedor. Having accepted the gifts, the khan put forward humiliating and impudent demands: in addition to a huge tribute, to give princely sisters and daughters as wives to the Mongol nobility. And for himself personally, he looked after the beautiful Evpraksinya, Fedor's wife. The prince answered with a decisive refusal and, together with the ambassadors, was put to a painful execution. And the princess, together with her little son, in order not to get to the conquerors, rushed down from the bell tower. The Ryazan army went against Batu, and "met him near the Ryazan borders." The battle was very difficult twelve times the Russian squad left the encirclement, “one Ryazan fought with a thousand, and two with darkness (ten thousand)” - this is how the chronicle writes about this battle. But Batu's superiority in strength was great, the Ryazanians suffered heavy losses. It was the turn of the fall of Ryazan. Ryazan held out for five days, on the sixth day, on the morning of December 21, it was taken. The entire city was destroyed and all the inhabitants were exterminated. The Mongol-Tatars left behind only ashes. The Ryazan prince and his family also perished. The surviving residents of the Ryazan land gathered a squad (about 1700 people), headed by Evpaty Kolovrat. They caught up with the enemy in the Suzdal land and began to wage partisan struggle against him, inflicting heavy losses on the Mongols.

The defeat of the Vladimir principality

Having ruined the Ryazan land, in January 1238. Mongol invaders defeated the grand duke guard regiment of the Vladimir-Suzdal land near Kolomna, led by the grand duke's son Vsevolod Yuryevich.

Strong resistance to the enemy for 5 days was provided by the population of Moscow, led by the governor Philip Nyanka. After the capture by the Mongols, Moscow was burned, and its inhabitants were killed.

Then the Mongols captured Suzdal and a number of other cities.

February 4, 1238 Batu besieged Vladimir. The distance from Kolomna to Vladimir (300 km) was covered by his troops in a month. On the fourth day of the siege, the invaders broke into the city through gaps in the fortress wall near the Golden Gate. The princely family and the remnants of the troops closed in the Assumption Cathedral. The Mongols surrounded the cathedral with trees and set it on fire. After the capture of Vladimir, the hordes of conquerors scattered throughout the Vladimir-Suzdal land, plundering and destroying everything in their path. (14 cities were destroyed)

March 4, 1238 beyond the Volga, on the river. City, a battle took place between the main forces of North-Eastern Rus', headed by the Grand Duke of Vladimir Yuri Vsevolodovich and the Mongol invaders. The Russian army was defeated, and the Grand Duke himself died.

After the capture of the "suburb" of Novgorod land - Torzhok, the road to North-Western Rus' was opened before the conquerors. However, the approach of spring thaw and significant human losses forced the Mongols, not having reached Veliky Novgorod about 100 miles, to turn back to the Polovtsian sepia. On the way, they defeated Kursk and the small town of Kozelsk on the river. Zhizdra. The defenders of Kozelsk put up fierce resistance to the enemy, defending themselves for seven weeks. After its capture in May 1238. Batu ordered to wipe out this "evil city" from the face of the earth, and to exterminate the remaining inhabitants without exception.

Summer 1238 Batu spent in the Don steppes, restoring the strength of his troops. However, already in the fall, his detachments again devastated the Ryazan land, capturing Gorkhovets, Murom and several other cities. In the spring of the following year, 1239, the Batu troops defeated the Principality of Pereyaslavl, and in the autumn the Chernigov-Seversk land was devastated.

Invasion of Southwestern Rus'

Autumn 1240. Mongol rati moved to conquer Western Europe through South Rus'. In September they crossed the Dnieper and surrounded Kyiv. After a long siege on December 6, 1240. the city fell. The South Russian princes were never able to organize a united defense of their lands. In the winter of 1240 - 1241. Mongolian tumens captured almost all the cities of Southern Rus', with the exception of Kholm, Kamenets and Danilov.

Batu's campaign in Europe

After the defeat of Rus', the Mongol hordes moved to Europe. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Balkan countries were devastated. The Mongols reached the borders of the German Empire, reached the Adriatic Sea. However, at the end of 1242 they suffered a series of setbacks in Bohemia and Hungary. From the distant Karakorum came the news of the death of the great Khan Ogedei - the son of Genghis Khan. It was a convenient excuse to stop the difficult campaign. Batu turned his troops back to the east. A decisive world-historical role in the salvation of European civilization from the Mongol hordes was played by the heroic struggle against them by the Russian and other peoples of our country, who took the first blow from the invaders. In fierce battles in Rus', the best part of the Mongol army perished. The Mongols lost their offensive power. They could not but reckon with the liberation struggle unfolding in the rear of their troops. A. S. Pushkin rightly wrote: “Russia was assigned a great destiny: its boundless plains absorbed the power of the Mongols and stopped their invasion on the very edge of Europe ... the emerging enlightenment was saved by torn Russia”

Upon his return in 1243. Batu formed the westernmost ulus - the state of the Golden Horde with the capital Sarai-Batu. The state created by Batu occupied a vast territory: from the Siberian rivers Irtysh and Ob - in the east to the Carpathians and Danube - in the West and from the Caspian steppes and the Caucasus Mountains - in the south to the black earth strip and the upper reaches of the Volga and Kama - in the north.

MONGOLO-TATAR INVASION

Formation of the Mongolian state. At the beginning of the XIII century. in Central Asia, in the territory from Lake Baikal and the upper reaches of the Yenisei and Irtysh in the north to the southern regions of the Gobi Desert and the Great Wall of China, the Mongolian state was formed. By the name of one of the tribes that roamed near Lake Buirnur in Mongolia, these peoples were also called Tatars. Subsequently, all the nomadic peoples with whom Rus' fought began to be called Mongolo-Tatars.

The main occupation of the Mongols was extensive nomadic cattle breeding, and in the north and in the taiga regions - hunting. In the XII century. among the Mongols there was a disintegration of primitive communal relations. From the environment of ordinary community members-cattle breeders, who were called karachu - black people, noyons (princes) stood out - to know; having squads of nukers (warriors), she seized pastures for livestock and part of the young. The noyons also had slaves. The rights of the noyons were determined by "Yasa" - a collection of teachings and instructions.

In 1206, a congress of the Mongol nobility - kurultai (Khural) took place on the Onon River, at which one of the noyons was elected the leader of the Mongol tribes: Temuchin, who received the name Genghis Khan - "great khan", "sent by God" (1206-1227). Having defeated his opponents, he began to rule the country through his relatives and the local nobility.

Mongolian army. The Mongols had a well-organized army that maintained tribal ties. The army was divided into tens, hundreds, thousands. Ten thousand Mongol warriors were called "darkness" ("tumen").

Tumens were not only military, but also administrative units.

The main striking force of the Mongols was the cavalry. Each warrior had two or three bows, several quivers with arrows, an ax, a rope lasso, and was proficient with a saber. The warrior's horse was covered with skins, which protected it from the arrows and weapons of the enemy. The head, neck and chest of the Mongol warrior from enemy arrows and spears were covered with an iron or copper helmet, leather armor. The Mongolian cavalry had high mobility. On their undersized, shaggy-maned, hardy horses, they could travel up to 80 km per day, and up to 10 km with carts, wall-beating and flamethrower guns. Like other peoples, passing through the stage of state formation, the Mongols were distinguished by their strength and solidity. Hence the interest in expanding pastures and in organizing predatory campaigns against neighboring agricultural peoples, who were at a much higher level of development, although they experienced a period of fragmentation. This greatly facilitated the implementation of the conquest plans of the Mongol-Tatars.

Defeat of Central Asia. The Mongols began their campaigns with the conquest of the lands of their neighbors - Buryats, Evenks, Yakuts, Uighurs, Yenisei Kirghiz (by 1211). Then they invaded China and in 1215 took Beijing. Three years later, Korea was conquered. Having defeated China (finally conquered in 1279), the Mongols significantly increased their military potential. Flamethrowers, wall-beaters, stone-throwing tools, vehicles were taken into service.

In the summer of 1219, almost 200,000 Mongol troops led by Genghis Khan began the conquest of Central Asia. The ruler of Khorezm (a country at the mouth of the Amu Darya), Shah Mohammed, did not accept a general battle, dispersing his forces over the cities. Having suppressed the stubborn resistance of the population, the invaders stormed Otrar, Khojent, Merv, Bukhara, Urgench and other cities. The ruler of Samarkand, despite the demand of the people to defend himself, surrendered the city. Mohammed himself fled to Iran, where he soon died.

The rich, flourishing agricultural regions of Semirechye (Central Asia) turned into pastures. Irrigation systems built up over centuries were destroyed. The Mongols introduced a regime of cruel requisitions, artisans were taken into captivity. As a result of the conquest of Central Asia by the Mongols, nomadic tribes began to inhabit its territory. Sedentary agriculture was supplanted by extensive nomadic pastoralism, which slowed down the further development of Central Asia.

Invasion of Iran and Transcaucasia. The main force of the Mongols with the loot returned from Central Asia to Mongolia. The 30,000-strong army under the command of the best Mongol commanders Jebe and Subedei set off on a long-range reconnaissance campaign through Iran and Transcaucasia, to the West. Having defeated the united Armenian-Georgian troops and causing enormous damage to the economy of Transcaucasia, the invaders, however, were forced to leave the territory of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as they met with strong resistance from the population. Past Derbent, where there was a passage along the coast of the Caspian Sea, the Mongolian troops entered the steppes of the North Caucasus. Here they defeated the Alans (Ossetians) and Polovtsy, after which they ravaged the city of Sudak (Surozh) in the Crimea. The Polovtsy, led by Khan Kotyan, the father-in-law of the Galician prince Mstislav Udaly, turned to the Russian princes for help.

Battle on the Kalka River. On May 31, 1223, the Mongols defeated the allied forces of the Polovtsian and Russian princes in the Azov steppes on the Kalka River. This was the last major joint military action of the Russian princes on the eve of the invasion of Batu. However, the powerful Russian prince Yuri Vsevolodovich of Vladimir-Suzdal, the son of Vsevolod the Big Nest, did not participate in the campaign.

Princely strife also affected during the battle on the Kalka. The Kiev prince Mstislav Romanovich, having fortified himself with his army on a hill, did not take part in the battle. Regiments of Russian soldiers and Polovtsians, having crossed the Kalka, struck at the advanced detachments of the Mongol-Tatars, who retreated. The Russian and Polovtsian regiments were carried away by the persecution. The main Mongol forces that approached, took the pursuing Russian and Polovtsian warriors in pincers and destroyed them.

The Mongols laid siege to the hill, where the prince of Kiev fortified. On the third day of the siege, Mstislav Romanovich believed the promise of the enemy to honorably release the Russians in the event of a voluntary surrender and laid down his arms. He and his warriors were brutally killed by the Mongols. The Mongols reached the Dnieper, but did not dare to enter the borders of Rus'. Rus' has not yet known a defeat equal to the battle on the Kalka River. Only a tenth of the troops returned to Rus' from the Azov steppes. In honor of their victory, the Mongols held a "feast on the bones". The captured princes were crushed with boards on which the victors sat and feasted.

Preparation of a campaign to Rus'. Returning to the steppes, the Mongols made an unsuccessful attempt to capture Volga Bulgaria. Reconnaissance in force showed that wars of conquest against Russia and its neighbors could be waged only by organizing a general Mongol campaign. At the head of this campaign was the grandson of Genghis Khan - Batu (1227-1255), who inherited from his grandfather all the territories in the west, "where the foot of the Mongol horse sets foot." His main military adviser was Subedei, who knew the theater of future military operations well.

In 1235, at the Khural in the capital of Mongolia, Karakorum, a decision was made on a general Mongol campaign to the West. In 1236 the Mongols captured the Volga Bulgaria, and in 1237 they subjugated the nomadic peoples of the Steppe. In the autumn of 1237, the main forces of the Mongols, having crossed the Volga, concentrated on the Voronezh River, aiming at the Russian lands. In Rus', they knew about the impending formidable danger, but the princely feuds prevented the sips from uniting to repel a strong and treacherous enemy. There was no unified command. Fortifications of cities were erected for defense against neighboring Russian principalities, and not from steppe nomads. The princely cavalry squads were not inferior to the Mongol noyons and nukers in terms of armament and fighting qualities. But the bulk of the Russian army was made up of the militia - urban and rural warriors, inferior to the Mongols in weapons and combat skills. Hence the defensive tactics, designed to deplete the enemy's forces.

Defense of Ryazan. In 1237, Ryazan was the first of the Russian lands to be attacked by invaders. The Princes of Vladimir and Chernigov refused to help Ryazan. The Mongols laid siege to Ryazan and sent envoys who demanded obedience and one-tenth "in everything." The courageous answer of the people of Ryazan followed: "If we are all gone, then everything will be yours." On the sixth day of the siege, the city was taken, the princely family and the surviving inhabitants were killed. In the old place, Ryazan was no longer revived (modern Ryazan is a new city located 60 km from the old Ryazan, it used to be called Pereyaslavl Ryazansky).

Conquest of North-Eastern Rus'. In January 1238, the Mongols moved along the Oka River to the Vladimir-Suzdal land. The battle with the Vladimir-Suzdal army took place near the city of Kolomna, on the border of the Ryazan and Vladimir-Suzdal lands. In this battle, the Vladimir army died, which actually predetermined the fate of North-Eastern Rus'.

Strong resistance to the enemy for 5 days was provided by the population of Moscow, led by the governor Philip Nyanka. After the capture by the Mongols, Moscow was burned, and its inhabitants were killed.

February 4, 1238 Batu besieged Vladimir. The distance from Kolomna to Vladimir (300 km) was covered by his troops in a month. On the fourth day of the siege, the invaders broke into the city through gaps in the fortress wall near the Golden Gate. The princely family and the remnants of the troops closed in the Assumption Cathedral. The Mongols surrounded the cathedral with trees and set it on fire.

After the capture of Vladimir, the Mongols broke up into separate detachments and crushed the cities of North-Eastern Rus'. Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich, even before the approach of the invaders to Vladimir, went to the north of his land to gather military forces. Hastily assembled regiments in 1238 were defeated on the Sit River (the right tributary of the Mologa River), and Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich himself died in the battle.

The Mongol hordes moved to the north-west of Rus'. Everywhere they met stubborn resistance from the Russians. For two weeks, for example, a distant suburb of Novgorod, Torzhok, defended itself. North-Western Rus' was saved from defeat, although it paid tribute.

Having reached the stone Ignach Cross - an ancient sign on the Valdai watershed (one hundred kilometers from Novgorod), the Mongols retreated south, to the steppe, in order to restore losses and give rest to tired troops. The retreat was in the nature of a "raid". Divided into separate detachments, the invaders "combed" the Russian cities. Smolensk managed to fight back, other centers were defeated. Kozelsk, which held out for seven weeks, put up the greatest resistance to the Mongols during the "raid". The Mongols called Kozelsk an "evil city".

Capture of Kyiv. In the spring of 1239, Batu defeated South Rus' (Pereyaslavl South), in the fall - the Chernigov principality. In the autumn of the next 1240, the Mongol troops crossed the Dnieper and laid siege to Kyiv. After a long defense, led by the governor Dmitr, the Tatars defeated Kyiv. In the next 1241, the Galicia-Volyn principality was attacked.

Batu's campaign against Europe. After the defeat of Rus', the Mongol hordes moved to Europe. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Balkan countries were devastated. The Mongols reached the borders of the German Empire, reached the Adriatic Sea. However, at the end of 1242 they suffered a series of setbacks in Bohemia and Hungary. From distant Karakorum came the news of the death of the great Khan Ogedei - the son of Genghis Khan. It was a convenient excuse to stop the difficult campaign. Batu turned his troops back to the east.

A decisive world-historical role in the salvation of European civilization from the Mongol hordes was played by the heroic struggle against them by the Russian and other peoples of our country, who took the first blow from the invaders. In fierce battles in Rus', the best part of the Mongol army perished. The Mongols lost their offensive power. They could not but reckon with the liberation struggle unfolding in the rear of their troops. A.S. Pushkin rightly wrote: "A great destiny was determined for Russia: its boundless plains absorbed the power of the Mongols and stopped their invasion on the very edge of Europe ... the emerging enlightenment was saved by torn to pieces by Russia."

Fight against the aggression of the crusaders. The coast from the Vistula to the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea was inhabited by Slavic, Baltic (Lithuanian and Latvian) and Finno-Ugric (Ests, Karelians, etc.) tribes. At the end of the XII - beginning of the XIII centuries. the peoples of the Baltic states are completing the process of disintegration of the primitive communal system and the formation of an early class society and statehood. These processes were most intense among the Lithuanian tribes. The Russian lands (Novgorod and Polotsk) exerted a significant influence on their western neighbors, who did not yet have a developed state of their own and church institutions (the peoples of the Baltic were pagans).

The attack on Russian lands was part of the predatory doctrine of the German chivalry "Drang nach Osten" (onslaught to the East). In the XII century. it began the seizure of lands belonging to the Slavs beyond the Oder and in the Baltic Pomerania. At the same time, an offensive was carried out on the lands of the Baltic peoples. The invasion of the crusaders into the lands of the Baltic states and North-Western Rus' was sanctioned by the Pope and the German Emperor Frederick II. German, Danish, Norwegian knights and troops from other northern European countries also took part in the crusade.

Knightly orders. In order to conquer the lands of the Estonians and Latvians, the knightly Order of the Sword-bearers was created in 1202 from the Crusaders defeated in Asia Minor. The knights wore clothes with the image of a sword and a cross. They pursued an aggressive policy under the slogan of Christianization: "Whoever does not want to be baptized must die." Back in 1201, the knights landed at the mouth of the Western Dvina (Daugava) River and founded the city of Riga on the site of the Latvian settlement as a stronghold for subjugating the Baltic lands. In 1219, the Danish knights captured part of the Baltic coast, founding the city of Revel (Tallinn) on the site of an Estonian settlement.

In 1224 the crusaders took Yuriev (Tartu). To conquer the lands of Lithuania (Prussians) and the southern Russian lands in 1226, the knights of the Teutonic Order, founded in 1198 in Syria during the Crusades, arrived. Knights - members of the order wore white cloaks with a black cross on the left shoulder. In 1234, the Swordsmen were defeated by the Novgorod-Suzdal troops, and two years later, by the Lithuanians and Semigallians. This forced the crusaders to join forces. In 1237, the swordsmen united with the Teutons, forming a branch of the Teutonic Order - the Livonian Order, named after the territory inhabited by the Liv tribe, which was captured by the Crusaders.

Neva battle. The offensive of the knights especially intensified due to the weakening of Rus', which bled in the fight against the Mongol conquerors.

In July 1240, the Swedish feudal lords tried to take advantage of the plight of Rus'. The Swedish fleet with an army on board entered the mouth of the Neva. Having risen along the Neva to the confluence of the Izhora River, the knightly cavalry landed on the shore. The Swedes wanted to capture the city of Staraya Ladoga, and then Novgorod.

Prince Alexander Yaroslavich, who was 20 years old at that time, with his retinue quickly rushed to the landing site. "We are few," he turned to his soldiers, "but God is not in power, but in truth." Covertly approaching the Swedes' camp, Alexander and his warriors hit them, and a small militia led by Misha from Novgorod cut off the Swedes' path along which they could flee to their ships.

Alexander Yaroslavich was nicknamed Nevsky by the Russian people for the victory on the Neva. The significance of this victory is that it stopped the Swedish aggression to the east for a long time, retained Russia's access to the Baltic coast. (Peter I, emphasizing the right of Russia to the Baltic coast, founded the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in the new capital on the site of the battle.)

Battle on the Ice. In the summer of the same 1240, the Livonian Order, as well as Danish and German knights, attacked Rus' and captured the city of Izborsk. Soon, due to the betrayal of the posadnik Tverdila and part of the boyars, Pskov was taken (1241). Strife and strife led to the fact that Novgorod did not help its neighbors. And the struggle between the boyars and the prince in Novgorod itself ended with the expulsion of Alexander Nevsky from the city. Under these conditions, individual detachments of the crusaders found themselves 30 km from the walls of Novgorod. At the request of the veche, Alexander Nevsky returned to the city.

Together with his retinue, Alexander liberated Pskov, Izborsk and other captured cities with a sudden blow. Having received the news that the main forces of the Order were coming at him, Alexander Nevsky blocked the way for the knights, placing his troops on the ice of Lake Peipsi. The Russian prince showed himself as an outstanding commander. The chronicler wrote about him: "Winning everywhere, but we won't win at all." Alexander deployed troops under the cover of a steep bank on the ice of the lake, eliminating the possibility of enemy reconnaissance of his forces and depriving the enemy of freedom of maneuver. Taking into account the construction of the knights by a "pig" (in the form of a trapezoid with a sharp wedge in front, which was heavily armed cavalry), Alexander Nevsky arranged his regiments in the form of a triangle, with a tip resting on the shore. Before the battle, part of the Russian soldiers were equipped with special hooks to pull the knights off their horses.

On April 5, 1242, a battle took place on the ice of Lake Peipsi, which was called the Battle of the Ice. The knight's wedge broke through the center of the Russian position and hit the shore. The flank strikes of the Russian regiments decided the outcome of the battle: like pincers, they crushed the knightly "pig". The knights, unable to withstand the blow, fled in panic. The Novgorodians drove them for seven versts across the ice, which by the spring had become weak in many places and collapsed under heavily armed soldiers. The Russians pursued the enemy, "flashed, rushing after him, as if through air," the chronicler wrote. According to the Novgorod chronicle, "400 Germans died in the battle, and 50 were taken prisoner" (German chronicles estimate the death toll at 25 knights). The captured knights were led in disgrace through the streets of the Lord Veliky Novgorod.

The significance of this victory lies in the fact that the military power of the Livonian Order was weakened. The response to the Battle of the Ice was the growth of the liberation struggle in the Baltic states. However, relying on the help of the Roman Catholic Church, the knights at the end of the XIII century. captured a significant part of the Baltic lands.

Russian lands under the rule of the Golden Horde. In the middle of the XIII century. one of the grandsons of Genghis Khan, Khubulai moved his headquarters to Beijing, founding the Yuan dynasty. The rest of the Mongol state was nominally subordinate to the great khan in Karakorum. One of the sons of Genghis Khan - Chagatai (Jagatai) received the lands of most of Central Asia, and the grandson of Genghis Khan Zulagu owned the territory of Iran, part of Western and Central Asia and Transcaucasia. This ulus, isolated in 1265, is called the Hulaguid state after the name of the dynasty. Another grandson of Genghis Khan from his eldest son Jochi - Batu founded the state of the Golden Horde.

Golden Horde. The Golden Horde covered a vast territory from the Danube to the Irtysh (Crimea, the North Caucasus, part of the lands of Rus' located in the steppe, the former lands of Volga Bulgaria and nomadic peoples, Western Siberia and part of Central Asia). The capital of the Golden Horde was the city of Sarai, located in the lower reaches of the Volga (a shed in Russian means a palace). It was a state consisting of semi-independent uluses, united under the rule of the khan. They were ruled by the Batu brothers and the local aristocracy.

The role of a kind of aristocratic council was played by the "Divan", where military and financial issues were resolved. Being surrounded by the Turkic-speaking population, the Mongols adopted the Turkic language. The local Turkic-speaking ethnic group assimilated the newcomers-Mongols. A new people was formed - the Tatars. In the first decades of the existence of the Golden Horde, its religion was paganism.

The Golden Horde was one of the largest states of its time. At the beginning of the XIV century, she could put up a 300,000th army. The heyday of the Golden Horde falls on the reign of Khan Uzbek (1312-1342). In this era (1312), Islam became the state religion of the Golden Horde. Then, just like other medieval states, the Horde experienced a period of fragmentation. Already in the XIV century. the Central Asian possessions of the Golden Horde separated, and in the 15th century. the Kazan (1438), Crimean (1443), Astrakhan (mid-15th century) and Siberian (end of the 15th century) khanates stood out.

Russian lands and the Golden Horde. The Russian lands devastated by the Mongols were forced to recognize vassal dependence on the Golden Horde. The unceasing struggle waged by the Russian people against the invaders forced the Mongol-Tatars to abandon the creation of their own administrative authorities in Rus'. Rus' retained its statehood. This was facilitated by the presence in Rus' of its own administration and church organization. In addition, the lands of Rus' were unsuitable for nomadic cattle breeding, in contrast, for example, to Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, and the Black Sea region.

In 1243, Yaroslav Vsevolodovich (1238-1246), the brother of the Grand Duke of Vladimir, who was killed on the Sit River, was called to the Khan's headquarters. Yaroslav recognized vassal dependence on the Golden Horde and received a label (letter) for the great reign of Vladimir and a golden plaque ("paydzu"), a kind of pass through the Horde territory. Following him, other princes reached out to the Horde.

To control the Russian lands, the institution of Baskak governors was created - the leaders of the military detachments of the Mongol-Tatars, who monitored the activities of the Russian princes. The denunciation of the Baskaks to the Horde inevitably ended either with the summoning of the prince to Sarai (often he lost his label, and even his life), or with a punitive campaign in the unruly land. Suffice it to say that only in the last quarter of the XIII century. 14 similar campaigns were organized in Russian lands.

Some Russian princes, in an effort to quickly get rid of vassal dependence on the Horde, took the path of open armed resistance. However, the forces to overthrow the power of the invaders were still not enough. So, for example, in 1252 the regiments of the Vladimir and Galician-Volyn princes were defeated. This was well understood by Alexander Nevsky, from 1252 to 1263 the Grand Duke of Vladimir. He set a course for the restoration and recovery of the economy of the Russian lands. The policy of Alexander Nevsky was also supported by the Russian Church, which saw a great danger in Catholic expansion, and not in the tolerant rulers of the Golden Horde.

In 1257, the Mongol-Tatars undertook a census of the population - "recording the number." Besermens (Muslim merchants) were sent to the cities, and the collection of tribute was paid off. The size of the tribute ("exit") was very large, only the "royal tribute", i.e. tribute in favor of the khan, which was first collected in kind, and then in money, amounted to 1300 kg of silver per year. The constant tribute was supplemented by "requests" - one-time extortions in favor of the khan. In addition, deductions from trade duties, taxes for "feeding" the khan's officials, etc. went to the khan's treasury. In total there were 14 types of tributes in favor of the Tatars. Census of the population in the 50-60s of the XIII century. marked by numerous uprisings of Russian people against the Baskaks, Khan's ambassadors, tribute collectors, scribes. In 1262, the inhabitants of Rostov, Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Suzdal, and Ustyug dealt with the tribute collectors, the Besermen. This led to the fact that the collection of tribute from the end of the XIII century. was handed over to the Russian princes.

The consequences of the Mongol conquest and the Golden Horde yoke for Rus'. The Mongol invasion and the Golden Horde yoke became one of the reasons for the Russian lands lagging behind the developed countries of Western Europe. Huge damage was done to the economic, political and cultural development of Rus'. Tens of thousands of people died in battle or were driven into slavery. A significant part of the income in the form of tribute went to the Horde.

The old agricultural centers and the once developed territories were abandoned and fell into decay. The border of agriculture moved to the north, the southern fertile soils were called the "Wild Field". Russian cities were subjected to mass ruin and destruction. Many crafts were simplified and sometimes even disappeared, which hampered the creation of small-scale production and ultimately delayed economic development.

The Mongol conquest preserved political fragmentation. It weakened the ties between the various parts of the state. Traditional political and trade ties with other countries were disrupted. The vector of Russian foreign policy, which ran along the "south - north" line (the fight against the nomadic danger, stable ties with Byzantium and through the Baltic with Europe), radically changed its direction to the "west - east". The pace of cultural development of the Russian lands slowed down.

What you need to know about these topics:

Archaeological, linguistic and written evidence about the Slavs.

Tribal unions of the Eastern Slavs in the VI-IX centuries. Territory. Classes. "The Way from the Varangians to the Greeks". Social system. Paganism. Prince and squad. Campaigns to Byzantium.

Internal and external factors that prepared the emergence of statehood among the Eastern Slavs.

Socio-economic development. Formation of feudal relations.

Early feudal monarchy of the Rurikids. "Norman theory", its political meaning. Management organization. Domestic and foreign policy of the first Kyiv princes (Oleg, Igor, Olga, Svyatoslav).

The heyday of the Kievan state under Vladimir I and Yaroslav the Wise. Completion of the unification of the Eastern Slavs around Kyiv. Border defense.

Legends about the spread of Christianity in Rus'. Adoption of Christianity as the state religion. The Russian Church and its role in the life of the Kyiv state. Christianity and paganism.

"Russian Truth". The establishment of feudal relations. organization of the ruling class. Princely and boyar estates. Feudal-dependent population, its categories. Serfdom. Peasant communities. City.

The struggle between the sons and descendants of Yaroslav the Wise for the grand ducal power. fragmentation tendencies. Lyubech Congress of Princes.

Kievan Rus in the system of international relations in the 11th - early 12th centuries. Polovtsian danger. Princely feuds. Vladimir Monomakh. The final collapse of the Kievan state at the beginning of the XII century.

Culture of Kievan Rus. Cultural heritage of the Eastern Slavs. Folklore. Epics. The origin of Slavic writing. Cyril and Methodius. Beginning of chronicle. "The Tale of Bygone Years". Literature. Education in Kievan Rus. Birch letters. Architecture. Painting (frescoes, mosaics, iconography).

Economic and political reasons for the feudal fragmentation of Rus'.

feudal landownership. Urban development. Princely power and boyars. The political system in various Russian lands and principalities.

The largest political formations on the territory of Rus'. Rostov-(Vladimir)-Suzdal, Galicia-Volyn principality, Novgorod boyar republic. Socio-economic and internal political development of principalities and lands on the eve of the Mongol invasion.

International position of Russian lands. Political and cultural ties between Russian lands. Feudal strife. Fighting external danger.

The rise of culture in the Russian lands in the XII-XIII centuries. The idea of ​​the unity of the Russian land in the works of culture. "The Tale of Igor's Campaign".

Formation of the early feudal Mongolian state. Genghis Khan and the unification of the Mongol tribes. The conquest by the Mongols of the lands of neighboring peoples, northeastern China, Korea, Central Asia. Invasion of Transcaucasia and South Russian steppes. Battle on the Kalka River.

Campaigns of Batu.

Invasion of North-Eastern Rus'. The defeat of southern and southwestern Rus'. Campaigns of Batu in Central Europe. Rus''s struggle for independence and its historical significance.

Aggression of the German feudal lords in the Baltic. Livonian order. The defeat of the Swedish troops on the Neva and the German knights in the Battle of the Ice. Alexander Nevskiy.

Formation of the Golden Horde. Socio-economic and political system. Control system for conquered lands. The struggle of the Russian people against the Golden Horde. The consequences of the Mongol-Tatar invasion and the Golden Horde yoke for the further development of our country.

The inhibitory effect of the Mongol-Tatar conquest on the development of Russian culture. Destruction and destruction of cultural property. Weakening of traditional ties with Byzantium and other Christian countries. Decline of crafts and arts. Oral folk art as a reflection of the struggle against the invaders.

• Sakharov A.N., Buganov V.I. History of Russia from ancient times to the end of the 17th century.

Mongol conquest of Central Asia

After the high-profile victories won in Central Asia, the Mongol nobility directed their thoughts to the conquest of East Turkestan, Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The Mongolian state was separated from the empire of Khorezmshahs by a buffer possession, headed by Kuchluk Khan. He was the leader of the Naimans who fled to the west as a result of the defeat in 1204 from the army of Temujin. Kuchluk went to the Irtysh valley, where he united with the Merkit khan Tokhtoa-beki. However, after another defeat in 1205, Kuchluk, with the remnants of the Naimans and Kereites, fled to the valley of the river. Chu. As a result of a long struggle with local Turkic tribes and Kara-Kitays, he established himself in East Turkestan and South Semirechie. However, in 1218 a huge Mongol army under the command of Jebe Noyon defeated the detachments of Kuchluk Khan. Genghis Khan, having conquered East Turkestan and South Semirechye, came close to the borders of the power of Khorezmshahs, which included Central Asia and most of Iran.

After the capture by the Mongols of a significant territory of the Jin empire, Khorezmshah Muhammad II (1200-1220) sent his ambassadors to the court of Genghis Khan. The main purpose of this diplomatic mission was to obtain information about the armed forces and further military plans of the Mongols. Genghis Khan received the envoys from Khorezm favorably, expressing his hope for the establishment of intensive trade relations with the Muslim East. He ordered to convey to Sultan Muhammad that he considers him the ruler of the West, and himself - the ruler of Asia. After that, he sent a response embassy to Urgench, the capital of the state of Khorezmshahs. The formidable warrior proposed through his ambassadors to conclude an agreement on peace and trade between the two world powers.

In 1218, the Mongols sent a large trade caravan to Central Asia, carrying many expensive goods and gifts. However, upon arrival in the border town of Otrar, the caravan was looted and killed. This became a convenient pretext for organizing a grandiose campaign of the Mongol rati. In the autumn of 1219, Genghis Khan moved his army from the banks of the Irtysh to the west. In the same year it invaded Maverannahr.

The news of this alarmed the Sultan's court in Urgench. The urgently assembled supreme state council was unable to work out a reasonable plan of military action. Shihab ad-din Khivaki, the closest associate of Muhammad II, proposed to assemble a people's militia and meet the enemy on the banks of the Syr Darya with all the fighting forces. Other plans for military operations were also proposed, but the Sultan chose the tactics of passive defense. Khorezmshah and the dignitaries and generals who supported him, underestimating the siege art of the Mongols, relied on the fortress of the cities of Maverannahr. The Sultan decided to concentrate the main forces on the Amu Darya, reinforcing them with militias from neighboring regions. Muhammad and his commanders, having settled in the fortresses, expected to attack the Mongols after they had scattered throughout the country in search of prey. However, this strategic plan did not materialize, which led to the death of thousands of rural and urban populations in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan.

The huge army of Genghis Khan reached Otrar in the autumn of 1219 and captured it after a five-month siege (1220). From here, the Mongols moved forward in three directions. One of the detachments under the command of Jochi Khan went to capture the cities in the lower reaches of the Syr Darya. The second detachment moved to conquer Khujand, Benaket and other points of Maverannahr. The main forces of the Mongols, under the leadership of Genghis Khan himself and his youngest son, Tului, headed for Bukhara.

The Mongolian army, like a fiery tornado, fell on the cities and villages of Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Everywhere they met resistance from ordinary peasants, artisans, and shepherds. Heroic resistance to foreigners was put up by the population of Khojent, led by Emir Timur Malik.

At the beginning of 1220, after a short siege, Genghis Khan took, destroyed and burned Bukhara. Most of the townspeople, with the exception of the local nobility who went over to the side of the conquerors and some of the captured artisans, were killed. Accidentally surviving from the massacre, the inhabitants were mobilized into militias to conduct siege work.

In March 1220, the hordes of Genghis Khan appeared near Samarkand, where a strong garrison of the Khorezmshah was concentrated. However, the city was taken, destroyed and completely robbed.

The defenders of Samarkand were killed; only a part of skilled artisans escaped this fate, but was driven into slavery. Soon the whole of Maverannahr was under the rule of the Mongols.

The resulting critical situation required urgent and decisive measures, but the weak-willed Sultan and his closest associates did nothing to organize a rebuff to the enemy. Mad with fear, they sowed panic, sending decrees everywhere about the non-interference of the civilian population in hostilities. Khorezmshah decided to flee to Iraq. Genghis Khan sent a detachment of the Mongol army to pursue Muhammad, who had gone to Nishapur, and from there to Qazvin. The Mongol cavalry rapidly moved in the footsteps of the Khorezmshah to Northern Khorasan. Detachments of Jebe, Subedai and Toguchar-noyon captured in 1220 Nisa and other cities and fortresses of Khorasan and Iran. Fleeing from the persecution of the Mongols, the Khorezmshah crossed over to a deserted island in the Caspian Sea, where he died in December 1220.

In late 1220 - early 1221, Genghis Khan sent his generals to conquer Khorezm. Here at that time concentrated the remnants of the Sultan's army, consisting mainly of the Kipchaks. The sons of Khorezmshah Muhammad, Ak-sultan and Ozlag-sultan, were in Khorezm, who did not want to cede power to their elder brother, Jalal ad-din. The forces of the Khorezmians were divided into two camps, which made it easier for the Mongols to capture the country. As a result of sharp disagreements with his brothers, Jalal ad-din was forced to leave Khorezm, he crossed the Karakum and went to Iran, and from there to Afghanistan. While in Herat and later in Ghazni, he began to assemble a combat-ready anti-Mongolian force.

At the beginning of 1221, the army of Genghis Khan under the command of the princes Jochi, Ogedei and Chagatai captured almost the entire left-bank part of the lower reaches of the Amu Darya. The Mongol detachments began the siege of Urgench, the capture of which was given special importance by Genghis Khan. The blockade of the city for six months did not produce any results. Only after the assault, Urgench was captured, destroyed, and its remains were flooded by the waters of the Amu Darya (April 1221).

Jalal ad-din, who gathered a large army, offered fierce resistance to the Mongols. In the summer of 1221, he defeated the thirty-thousandth army of the Mongols in a battle in the Pervan steppe. Genghis Khan, concerned about the successes of Jalal ad-din and the rebels in Khorasan, personally opposed him. Jalal ad-din was defeated in a battle on the banks of the river. Indus and went deep into India, where, however, he did not receive the support of local feudal lords, in particular the Delhi Sultan Shams ad-din Iltutmysh. In the meantime, Mongolian detachments suppressed popular uprisings and again captured Northern Khorasan.

In October 1224, the main contingent of Genghis Khan's army crossed the Amu Darya and moved to Mongolia. One of the important reasons for her departure to Central Asia was the uprising of the inhabitants of Tangut. Genghis Khan transferred the management (primarily tax) of Central Asia to the Khorezm merchant Mahmud Yalovach (his heirs performed these functions until the beginning of the 14th century). The conquerors placed their representatives of power, or chief rulers (daruga) in the conquered regions; military garrisons were kept in cities and fortresses.

Taking advantage of Genghis Khan's departure to Mongolia, Jalal ad-din returned from India to Iran. His power was recognized by the local rulers - Fars, Kerman and Persian Iraq. In 1225, he took Tabriz and announced the restoration of the power of the Khorezmshahs. With the support of the city militia, Jalal ad-din won a victory over the Mongols near Isfahan in 1227, although he himself suffered heavy losses. At the same time, for a number of years, he made campaigns against the local feudal lords of Transcaucasia and Asia Minor. Jalal ad-din was a brave commander, but did not have the flexibility of a politician. With his ambitious behavior, predatory attacks, he turned against himself many representatives of the local nobility and the general population. In 1231, unable to withstand the dominance of the Khorezmians, artisans and the urban poor of Ganja rose up. Jalal ad-din suppressed the uprising, but a coalition of the rulers of Georgia, the Rum Sultanate, and the Ahlat Emirate formed against him.

After the death of Genghis Khan (1227), at the kurultai of 1229, his son Ogedei (1229-1241) was elevated to the throne of the Mongol Empire. Continuing the aggressive policy of his father, the great khan (kaan) ordered to move a huge army to Khorasan and Iran. The Mongolian army under the command of noyon Chormagun moved against Jalal ad-din. Having devastated Khorasan, she entered the borders of Iran. Under the onslaught of the Mongols, Jalal ad-din retreated to Southern Kurdistan along with the remnants of his troops. In 1231 he was killed near Diyarbakir. The death of Jalal ad-din opened the way for the Mongols deep into the countries of the Near and Middle East.

In 1243, Khorasan and the regions of Iran captured by Chormagun were handed over to Emir Arghun by order of Ogedei-kaan. He was appointed governor (Baskak) in the region almost completely devastated by the Mongols. Argun made an attempt to establish economic life and restore the rural settlements and cities of Khorasan. However, such a policy met with resistance from the Mongol steppe nobility, accustomed to robberies.

The Mongol conquest dealt a terrible blow to the development of the productive forces of the conquered countries. Huge masses of people were exterminated, and those left alive were turned into slaves. "The Tatars," wrote the 13th-century historian Ibn al-Asir, "did not take pity on anyone, but beat women, babies, ripped open the wombs of pregnant women and killed the fetuses." Rural settlements and cities became ruins, and some of them lay in ruins as early as the beginning of the 14th century. The agricultural oases of most regions were turned into nomadic pastures and camps. The local pastoral tribes also suffered from the conquerors. Plano Carpini wrote in the 40s of the 13th century that they "are also exterminated by the Tatars and live in their land, and those who remain are enslaved." The growth in the proportion of slavery under the Mongols led to the social regression of the conquered countries. The naturalization of the economy, the strengthening of the role of cattle breeding at the expense of agriculture, the reduction of domestic and international trade led to a general decline.

The countries and peoples conquered by the Mongols were divided among the offspring of Genghis Khan. Each of them was allocated an ulus (lot) with a certain number of troops and dependent people. Tului, the youngest son of Genghis Khan, according to custom, received Mongolia as an inheritance - the indigenous possession (yurt) of his father. 101 thousand soldiers out of 129 thousand people of the regular army were given over to him. Ogedei, the third son of Genghis Khan, was allocated an ulus in Western Mongolia centered on the upper Irtysh and Tarbagatai. After enthronement in 1229, he settled in Karakorum, the capital of the Mongol Empire. The heirs of Jochi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan, were given lands located west of the Irtysh and "from the borders of Kayalyk (in Semirechye) and Khorezm to the places of Saksin and Bulgar (on the Volga), up to those limits where the hooves of the Tatar horses reached." In other words, this inheritance included the northern part of the Semirechye and the Eastern Dashti Kipchak, including the Lower Volga region. The boundaries of the Dzhuchiev ulus were expanded under Batu Khan, who made a trip to Kama Bulgaria, to Rus' and to Central Europe. After the formation of the Golden Horde, the Lower Volga region became the center of the Jochid ulus. Chagatai, the second son of Genghis Khan, received from his father 4 "darkness" (or tumena, Mong. "10,000", as well as "countless"), which included the territories of the Barlas and Kungrat tribes, and lands from the Southern Altai and the river. Or to the Amu Darya. His possessions covered Eastern Turkestan, a significant part of Semirechye and Maverannahr. The main territory of his ulus was called Il-Alargu, the center of which was the city of Almalyk.

Thus, a significant part of Central Asia and East Kazakhstan became part of the possessions of Chagatai. However, his power extended directly to the nomadic Mongols and the steppe Turkic-speaking tribes conquered by them, the actual control in the western regions of the Chagatai ulus was carried out according to the order of Genghis Khan by Mahmud Yalovach. Having chosen Khojent as his residence, he ruled in the region with the help of military contingents of Mongolian Baskaks and darugachi (or daruga).

The situation of the settled population of Maverannahr after the invasion of Genghis Khan was very difficult. The domination of foreigners was accompanied by acts of brutal violence, extortion and robbery of civilians. In this, the Mongolian aristocracy was helped by the Central Asian nobility, who went over to the side of the conquerors. The dominance of newcomers and local feudal lords led to an uprising of the masses of Bukhara. In 1238, the villagers of Tarab, one of the villages in the vicinity of Bukhara, rose to fight. The rebels were led by sieve maker Mahmud Tarabi. Gathering peasant detachments, he entered Bukhara and occupied the palace of the Sadr dynasty that ruled the city. However, the rebels were soon defeated, and Mahmud Tarabi died in a battle with the Mongol army. After that, Mahmud Yalovach was recalled to Karakorum and removed from his post. His son Masud-bek was appointed instead of him.

In the late 40s - early 50s of the XIII century. fierce strife and a struggle for power began between the descendants of Genghis Khan. With significant military forces and economic power, they strove for independence in every possible way. This process was also based on the further development of the specific feudal system in the Mongol Empire. The absence of strong economic, political and cultural ties, the multi-tribal nature of the empire, the struggle of the conquered peoples against their enslavers led to the disintegration of the vast Mongol state into independent states.

Chagatai, being the eldest in the Genghisid family, enjoyed great authority and influence, and Khan Ogedei did not make important decisions without his consent. Chagatai appointed as his heir Kara Hulagu, the son of his brother, Matugen. After the death in 1241 of Ogedei, and then of Chagatai, as a result of a sharp confrontation in 1246, Guyuk (1246-1248) became the great khan. Yesu Mongke was proclaimed the ruler of the Chagatai ulus. Kara Hulagu was removed from power by the united heirs of the Chagatai and Ogedei uluses. However, after the death of Guyuk, the flames of a new internecine turmoil flared up. During a fierce struggle between the descendants of Ogedei and Tului, Möngke (1251-1259), the eldest son of Tului, came to power. Many princes from the Chagatai and Ogedei clans were executed. Orkyna, the widow of Kara Khulagu (died in 1252), became the ruler of the Chagatai ulus.

Mongol Empire in the middle of the XIII century. was actually divided between the heirs of Tului and Jochi. The border lines of the possessions of Batu, the son of Jochi, and the great Khan Mongke passed for a long time. Chu and Talas. Semirechye was under the rule of Mongke, and Maverannahr fell into the hands of the Jochids for a while.

In 1259, after the death of Mongke, a new round of feudal strife took place in the Mongol state, culminating in the proclamation of Khubilai, Mongke's brother, the supreme ruler of the Mongol Empire (1260).

The Genghisid state was considered as the property of the ruling dynasty, its numerous representatives. The great kaan had wide prerogatives, combining military, legislative and administrative-judicial power in one person. In the political structure of the Mongolian state, the kurultai, a council of nomadic nobility under the auspices of the Genghisids, was preserved. Formally, the kurultai was considered the highest authority, where the supreme khan was elected. Kurultai resolved issues of peace and war, domestic policy, considered important disputes and lawsuits. He gathered, however, in fact only to approve the decisions prepared in advance by the kaan and his inner circle. The councils of the Mongol nobility met until 1259 and ceased only with the death of Möngke Khan.

The Mongol empire, despite the existence of the supreme khan's power, actually consisted of a number of independent and semi-dependent possessions, or destinies (uluses). Ulus rulers - Genghisids - received income and taxes from their destinies, maintained their own court, troops, and civil administration. However, they were usually not allowed to interfere in the affairs of the administration of agricultural regions, in which the supreme khans appointed special officials.

The ruling layer of the Mongolian uluses consisted of the highest nobility, headed by the direct and lateral branches of the Chinggisid dynasty. Civil administration in the appanages was carried out over the settled population with the help of the old local bureaucracy. In the state of the Chagataids under Masud-bek, a monetary reform was carried out, which played an important role in the rise of the economy of Central Asia.

In some cases, civil administration in the state of the Chagataids was carried out with the help of old dynasts, who bore the title of "malik". There were such rulers in a number of large regions and cities of Maverannahr, in particular in Khojent, Ferghana, Otrar. In the conquered regions and cities of Central Asia and East Turkestan, the Mongol authorities proper, the daruga, were also appointed. Initially, their power was limited to the execution of a military function on the ground, but over time, their prerogatives expanded significantly. Daruga began to fulfill the duties of a census, recruiting troops, organizing a postal service, collecting and delivering taxes to the khan's horde.

The bulk of the nomadic and settled population of the Chagatai ulus was at various stages of the feudal system. The most developed feudal relations were in the agricultural regions, which retained the former socio-economic institutions. The nomadic population, which consisted of the Mongol proper and subjugated Turkic-speaking tribes, was at the early feudal stage of development with strong remnants of the tribal system. Nomads were obliged to perform military service, performed various duties and paid taxes in favor of their masters. The nomads were divided into dozens, hundreds, thousands and "darkness" to which they were attached. According to the regulations of Genghis Khan, they did not have the right to transfer from one owner or boss to another. Unauthorized passage or flight was punishable by death.

Mongolian arats paid taxes in favor of their nobility and the supreme khan's court. During the reign of Mongke, they collected the so-called kupchur in the amount of 1 head of cattle from 100 heads of animals. Kupchur was paid by peasants, as well as artisans and townspeople. In addition, the agricultural population paid a land tax - kharaj and other taxes and fees. Rural residents paid, in particular, a special tax in kind (tagar) for the maintenance of the Mongol army. They also had to bear the responsibility for the maintenance of postal stations (pits). The levying of numerous taxes was aggravated by the rapacious farming system, which ruined the masses of farmers and pastoralists.

At the beginning of the XIV century. the importance of the Chagataid clan in Central Asia and the Semirechye rapidly increased. The Chagataid rulers sought to centralize power and to further rapprochement with the settled nobility of Maverannahr. Kebek-khan (1318-1326) tried to restore city life, establish agriculture and trade. He carried out a monetary reform, which copied a similar reform of the Hulaguid ruler of Iran, Ghazan Khan. The silver coin introduced by him in 1321 became known as "kebeks". In violation of the ancient traditions of the nomadic Mongols, Kebek Khan rebuilt in the valley of the river. Kashkadarya Palace (Mong. Karshi), around which the city of Karshi grew. These innovations met with stubborn resistance from the backward patriarchal layers of the Mongolian aristocracy. Therefore, Kebek Khan's reforms were generally limited.

Under the brother and successor of Kebek Khan, Tarmashirin (1326-1334), the next step was taken towards rapprochement with the local nobility - the proclamation of Islam as the official religion. Tarmashirin fell victim to the nomadic Mongols, who held to patriarchal traditions and pagan beliefs.

In the late 40s - 50s of the XIV century. The Chagatai ulus broke up into a number of independent feudal estates. The western regions of the state were divided among the leaders of the Turkic-Mongolian tribes (Barlas, Dzhelair, Arlat, Kauchin). The northeastern territories of the Chagatai ulus became isolated in the 40s of the XIV century. in the independent state of Moghulistan. It included the lands of Eastern Turkestan, the steppes of the Irtysh and Balkhash regions. In the west, the borders of this state reached the middle reaches of the Syradya and the Tashkent oasis, in the south - the Ferghana Valley, and in the east - Kashgar and Turfan.

The main population of Moghulistan consisted of a pastoral population - the descendants of mixed Turkic-Mongolian tribes. Among them were Kangly, Kereites, Arlats, Barlas, Dughlats, from whose midst the local khan's family originated. In 1348, the nobility of the eastern regions of the Chagatai ulus elected Togluk-Timur as the supreme khan. Relying on the top of the Duglats and other clans, he subjugated Semirechye and part of East Turkestan. Togluk-Timur converted to Islam, enlisted the support of the Muslim clergy and began the struggle for the possession of Maverannahr. In 1360, he invaded from Semirechie into the Syr Darya valley, but disagreements between the military leaders interrupted his further advance into the depths of the Central Asian Mesopotamia. In the early spring of the following year, Togluk-Timur again set out on a campaign against Maverannahr, where Timur, who had previously received the city of Kesh (Shakhrisabz) from Togluk-Timur, went over to the side of the Mongols. The Moghulistan army occupied Samarkand and advanced south to the Hindu Kush mountain ranges. However, the power of Togluk-Timur in Maverannahr was short-lived. Soon he returned to Moghulistan, which was used by the local nomadic leaders to overthrow his son, Ilyas-Khoja, who had been left in the region as a governor. Timur also opposed him in alliance with the Chagataid, the ruler of Balkh, Emir Hussein. Ilyas-Khoja fled to Moghulistan, where turmoil began after the death of Togluk-Timur.

In 1365, Ilyas-Khoja attacked Maverannahr and defeated Hussein and his ally Timur in a battle on the banks of the Syr Darya. Having robbed the cities and villages of Tashkent and other oases, the Moghulistan army headed for Samarkand. Ilyas-Khoja could not capture the city, its defense was organized by the inhabitants themselves, headed by the Serbedars. Ilyas-Khodja was forced to withdraw back to Semirechye.