Timur sent a curt message to Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania, by Temür Qutlugh, one of the Horde’s generals. “Deliver up our fugitive, the lord Tokhtamysh.”
“I will not deliver up the lord Tokhtamysh” Vytautas replied; “but I will meet the lord Timur in battle.” He spoke proudly, for Vytautas had been chosen by Pope Boniface IX to lead a crusade against Timur, in the hope of making Russia a Roman Catholic land.* Nevertheless, in August 1399 Timur’s generals Temür Qutlugh and Edigu thrashed the Lithuanians at the Vorskla River, near Poltava.
Timur’s impatient attention had now turned towards India’s infidel Hindus, but in Russia the consequences of his rivalry with Tokhtamysh proved far-reaching. The Pope’s Lithuanian crusaders were humbled — a divine judgment upon them, said the citizens of Great Novgorod severely: Vytautas had openly coveted their bustling city. Tokhtamysh fled to the Muslim Khanate of Sibir, where he died. As for the Golden Horde, it shattered into a confusion of impotent khanates. Russia’s Christians gradually asserted religious and political sovereignty in their own land until at last, in 1480, Prince Ivan III of Moscow faced the Horde down once and for all, at the Great Stand at the River Ugra* — and he had Timur to thank for it.
* In addition to the campaigns in the Holy Land that began with the Council of Clermont in 1095 and ended with the loss of Acre in 1291, the Roman Church waged several crusades in northern and eastern Europe against pagans and against Christians who did not recognise the Pope’s universal authority. These campaigns included the Lithuanian crusades of 1283-1422. After Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, became a Roman Catholic in 1386, the focus shifted further east.