The Great Stand at the River Ugra
Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, finally stood up to the Great Horde and their opportunistic Western allies.
1480
King Edward IV 1461-1470, 1471-1483
Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, finally stood up to the Great Horde and their opportunistic Western allies.
1480
King Edward IV 1461-1470, 1471-1483
Back in 1238-1240, Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, had swept across Rus’ with his Tartar ‘Golden Horde’, laying waste to Kiev and forcing other cities to pay tribute. For years the extortion went on, while neighbouring Poland and Lithuania either sided with the Horde or threatened a conquest of their own. In 1480 Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, decided enough was enough.
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DURING the fifteenth century the Golden Horde had gradually divided into three independent Khanates, viz. the Crimean, the Kazan, and the Golden Horde. The Crimean Khanate and the Golden Horde were continually at war with each other, and Ivan III took advantage of this and refused to pay tribute. Khan Akhmat* of the Golden Horde sent envoys to collect it, and, as these were murdered in Moscow, he marched his army into Russia, and at the same time entered into an alliance with Casimir IV of Lithuania.*
Ivan met the Tartars on the banks of the Ugra,* but was afraid to give battle, and the two armies remained facing each other all through the autumn.* When the winter began, the Tartars, from want of winter clothing, were forced to turn south, and Akhmat was soon after murdered by one of his captains.* A few months later the Golden Horde was completely destroyed by Mengli Ghirei, the Crimean Khan,* and thus Russia was freed from the yoke of the Tartars in 1480.
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* Ahmed Khan bin Küchük (1465-1481).
* Casimir IV Jagiellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1440 and King of Poland from 1447 until his death in 1492. In the event, Casimir never came to Akhmat’s aid, abandoning him just as he had abandoned the Westward-looking politicians of Great Novgorod nine years earlier: see ‘We are Free Men of Novgorod’.
* The Great Stand took place about 100 miles southwest of Moscow, just northwest of where the River Ugra flows into the River Oka near Kaluga.
* Altered from ‘all through the summer and autumn’, as Akhmat’s troops did not gather at the River Ugra until the 6th of October 1480, though they had been manoeuvring since June. Fighting began on the 8th. The standoff lasted until November the 28th.
* Ibak Khan, prince of the Khanate of Sibir, murdered Akhmat on the 6th of January 1481. Cazalet gives the onset of winter as the reason for the withdrawal but modern historians still find it baffling. It was neither the first nor the last time that Moscow would be saved by a mysterious lack of enthusiasm among her enemies. See The Theotokos of Vladimir.
* In 1502, Mengli I Giray defeated Sheikh Ahmed (1499-1502) and ended forever the Horde’s threat to the Crimea Khanate, since 1475 a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. Sheikh Ahmed fled to Lithuania but was imprisoned in Kaunas by his imagined allies. He proved to be the last ruler of the Great Horde.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate her ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.