In the mid 13th century, the land that had once been the mighty Kievan Rus was a smoldering
husk, its cities and villages burnt down, its people slaughtered under a hail of Mongol
arrows.
However, one of them - the oldest Rus city, Novgorod the Great, was a world away from
the devastation.
Its walls still stood firm, the bells of the Nereditsa Church still tolled, and its streets
were abustle with lively commerce.
In this video, we will explore how a free Republic caught between Mongol hordes to the
east, and Catholic crusaders to the west, would scheme, bargain, and fight to survive.
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We must rewind the clock a few centuries to contextualize the city of Novgorod’s rise
to prominence as an autonomous power in the pre-Mongol era.
As you may recall from our previous episodes, Novgorod was the original capital of the Rus,
founded by the Rurik around 860.
Even after Rurik’s successor Oleg moved the capital to Kiev, Novgorod remained influential.
The people of Novgorod had always been free-willed, so when the Kievan Rus began splintering in
the early 12th century, the old Northern Capital emerged as one of the most dynamic independent
powers.
Novgorod ruled over a prosperous trading Empire, with the city itself serving as a central
hub of international commerce
This Novgorodian state had a unique system of government as it was not a hereditary monarchy,
but a republic since 1136, when the powerful merchant-lords of Novgorod, backed by the
general citizenry, overthrew Prince Vsevolod of Pskov.
Legislative power in Novgorod was controlled by the veche, a form of public assembly consisting
of nobles, clergy, merchants, and commoners.
Novgorod still had a Prince, but he had to be elected by the council, and could be fired,
if necessary.
That is not to say that the Novgorodian Princes became meaningless figureheads.
In fact, a particular Prince would soon emerge as one of Medieval Rus’ greatest military
leaders, and to many, the saviour of the Rus culture and faith.
In the year 1220, a boy known as Alexander was born to the Vsevolodovich dynasty, who
ruled Pereslavl and later, Vladimir.
The young princeling likely spent his childhood years learning to fight and lead men.
It was probably due to this pedigree that in 1236, his father dropped him off in Novgorod,
and the city council elected him to be their Prince, beseeching the young noble to take
charge of the city’s military affairs.
This was an incredibly tall order for a 16-year-old, as the city was in crisis.
To the east, the unstoppable horde of Batu Khan was thundering across the Rus heartland
and it would only be a matter of time before the Mongols would come to Novgorod.
In the west, the situation was just as volatile, as starting in the 12th century, various Latin
Christian powers had made headways into Northern Europe.
The Vikings of Scandinavia abandoned their old gods by the mid-1100s, and became more
or less Christianized, which allowed them to expand under the pretext of holy crusade.
The Kingdom of Sweden, in particular, began making ingresses into Finland claiming it
is converting the pagans of the region to Christianity, and by 1216, the Pope had recognized
Swedish suzerainty over Finland.
This expansion put Sweden on a collision course with Novgorod, who had economic and territorial
interests in Karelia.
The Catholic and Orthodox Churches had finally begun to overlap in the north.
Both sides desired land and power, and considered the other to be heretics, so the potential
for war was brewing.
According to the Chronicle of Novgorod, in the summer of 1240, a Swedish army led by
Bishop of Finland Thomas sailed up the Gulf of Finland in their longboats.
They then proceeded into Neva river with the aim of seizing control over Lake Ladoga, and
from there, striking at the city of Novgorod itself.
As the story goes, Prince Alexander wasted no time in rallying his druzhina and confronting
the Swedish host on the Neva, decisively routing the western invaders.
It should be noted that the battle at the Neva is never described in Swedish sources
and this has led some scholars to question if the battle at the Neva even happened in
the first place.
However, most agree, it was likely an impromptu border skirmish, rather than a full-scale
invasion.
Whatever the case, the young Prince Alexander had won his first military victory at the
age of 19 and received his sobriquet: Nevsky.
Alexander's success had made him some enemies as well, particularly the Boyars and Merchants
of Novgorod, who believed that his war jeopardized the delicate trade relations in the region.
Soon, the political situation deteriorated to the point where Nevsky and his soldiers
left the city.
This was bad timing indeed, for the Swedes were not the only Catholics who had ambitions
to take Novgorod territory.
It is now we move our focus south to the dense forests of the Baltic rim.
Much like Finland and Karelia, this region was one of the last holdouts of Paganism in
Europe.
The ancestors of the modern Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians had been fighting a losing war
against German and Danish invaders, who sought to convert them to Latin Christianity by force.
By 1228, much of the Baltic shore had been subdued by German Catholics, except for the
Estonian coast, which became Danish.
This land became known as Terra Mariana, the land of the virgin Mary.
It was an unstable colonial frontier, divided into several bishoprics directly sworn to
the Pope in Rome, but still inhabited by Baltic peoples who continued to resist Catholic overlordship
through guerilla warfare.
Throughout all this turmoil, a pair of Knightly orders rose as the apex predators of the northeast.
In Latvia and its environs, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword were dominant.
At the same time, directly to their south, the Teutonic Order waged a bloody crusade
against the Pagans of Old Prussia, establishing control over the region.
However, the balance of power was soon to shift.
In 1236, with the backing of the Papacy, the Brothers of the Sword launched an expedition
across the Daugava river to subdue and convert the Lithuanians.
However, Lithuanian tribes took advantage of the swampy forests of their homeland, ambushed
the Knights, and annihilated their invasion force.
So crushing was this defeat to the Brothers of the Sword, that their remaining members
had to join the Teutonic Order.
Now rebranded as the Livonian Order, they quickly rebuilt themselves into a powerful
autonomous chapter of the Teutons and this allowed them to wage a more effective war
upon the indigenous pagans.
By 1240, the Livonian Knights had established firm control on land as far east as Lake Peipus
[paypus] and now they neighbored the Novgorod Republic.
Once more, Catholic and Orthodox spheres of influence crashed together in northern Europe.
The council of Novgorod was initially divided on how to deal with the ever-encroaching Crusaders.
Initially, Slavic merchants prospered as trading partners with the Germans and Scandinavians,
and intermarriage between the Rus and newcomer nobility was not uncommon.
These ties to the west had been why Nevsky was forced into exile after his victory at
the Neva.
After all, what merchant would allow a glory-seeking Prince to chase off their best customers?
However, relations between east and west had begun to sour from 1224 when the Livonian
Knights took Tartu, a city that Novgorod considered to be within its political orbit.
The Crusaders also ramped up their efforts to convince the Novgorod aristocracy to convert
to Latin Christianity, which irritated the Slavs, for whom their Orthodoxy was the heart
of their society.
As diplomacy deteriorated, the German Knights began to gaze greedily at the wealth of Novgorod,
which, in their eyes, was a fair target as non-Catholics.
Around the year 1240, Pope Gregory IX finally authorized a crusade against Novgorod.
Hoping that the Republic would be too preoccupied dealing with the Mongols to the east to defend.
That same year, the Livonian knights stormed the outpost of Koporye, conquering it with
little resistance.
They established a permanent garrison and began the construction of a stone castle,
which made it evident to the people of Novgorod that the Knights had come to conquer.
Now in crisis mode, the veche of Novgorod turned back to the prince they had just exiled,
begging him to return.
Nevsky obliged, making haste for the northern capital.
By the time he arrived, the Crusaders had taken Novgorod’s sister-city and breadbasket
Pskov.
In the hands of an occupying force, it was a dagger pointed at the heart of the capital
itself.
Alexander knew that he had not a moment to waste and in the autumn of 1241, he struck
back, storming Koporye’s brand new castle and capturing it swiftly.
In the spring of 1242, he joined with the forces of his brother Andrey and thundered
into Pskov, retaking the city with little effort, likely because the Teutonic Knights
were preoccupied fighting the Mongols in Hungary at the time.
Nevsky’s swift military successes can likely be attributed to his druzhina, the archetypal
elite warrior retinue that had been a staple of Rus Princes for centuries.
Nevsky’s force traveled light, taking towns and castles before their Crusader enemy had
a chance to respond, a manner of warfare akin to his pagan ancestor Sviatoslav the Snow
Leopard, three centuries prior.
Following these successes, Nevsky mustered up a citizen militia to supplement his Druzhina’s
limited numbers, and launched an offensive raid into Catholic Estonia, breaking his army
off into contingents to raid and pillage the countryside.
This was a mistake, for he had overextended his forces, and the Teutons and their Estonian
allies managed to ambush and destroy one of the Rus raiding parties in an ambush on a
river crossing southwest of Tartu.
Nevsky decided to cut his losses, and orchestrated a careful retreat
Meanwhile, the Crusaders had been hastily assembling an army for a second invasion into
Rus lands.
Led by Bishop Hermann of Dorpat, it consisted of a core of Knights, alongside an allied
contingent of Danish soldiers and native Baltic auxiliaries.
By spring, they had begun pursuing Nevsky’s army northwards.
In April of 1242, the opposing armies met upon the frozen surface of lake Peipus.
Novgorod forces numbered some 5,000, while the Crusader alliance totalled at around 2,600.
The Catholics may have been outnumbered, but it was Nevsky who was outgunned.
Apart from the Princes’ druzhina and a contingent of allied Turkic horse-archers, the Rus army
was predominantly the poorly equipped, poorly trained militia raised from Novgorod’s general
citizenry.
Furthermore, the Crusader army had something the Rus did not, heavy cavalry.
Nevsky was direly aware of the fact that, in the hands of a capable commander, a single
deadly charge from a few hundred mounted knights could rout his entire army in minutes.
Nevertheless, against all the odds, the Novgorod militia held the line against the couched
lances of the black cross, allowing Nevsky to successfully pull off a pincer move with
his horse archer and druzhina units, driving the Knights and their allies off the field.
The day had been seized by the East Slavs.
This conflict, later immortalized as “the battle on the ice”, was a watershed moment
in the relationship between Medieval Rus and Catholic Europe.
A permanent border between Novgorod and the Crusader states was established along Lake
Peipus and the Narva River, and never again would the Teutons or their allies make serious
ingress into Rus territories.
For his victory, Alexander Nevsky earned immortality, known by all future generations of East Slavs
as a saint who saved the Orthodox Christianity.
Now, let us move back to the east, and address the Chingisid shaped elephant in the room.
While all this Crusader business had been happening, the Mongols had been ravaging their
way through the Northeastern Rus Principalities.
Nevsky’s solution for the Mongol problem was simple: Surrender.
While other Rus cities mounted futile resistance against Batu Khan, Nevsky instead sent envoys,
preemptively capitulating before the Mongols even reached his city, and accepting the Chingisid
Khans as his lawful overlords.
Because Novgorod had surrendered so quickly and willingly, it was spared the destruction
that other influential Rus cities were subjected to.
Why was Nevsky so willing to capitulate to the Mongols, but so insistent on fighting
the Crusaders tooth and nail?
The answer was simple.
To those who showed proper obedience, the Mongols ruled with a light touch.
They had no interest in influencing their subjects' religion, culture, or prevailing
system of government, so long as they paid tribute without issue, and allowed the Mongol
Khans to confirm their leaders.
Contrast this to the Crusaders, who had every intention of forcefully eradicating Orthodox
Christianity, and one can begin to see why the Novgorodians preferred a Steppe Warlord
to a German Bishop.
Nevsky spent the rest of his life as a loyal vassal of the Great Khan, making many trips
to the Mongol capitals of Sarai and Karakorum to pay his respects.
The ruler of Novgorod used his submission to the Mongols as a key to political advancement.
Indeed, the Mongol Khan bestowed upon him the title of Grand Prince of Kiev in 1246.
Of course, in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests, Kiev was a shell of its former
self, but the title itself still held significant symbolic power and gave him an edge over other
Rus princes who now competed for the Khan’s favour.
Alexander would only continue to grow more and more influential under the Mongol wing.
In 1252, his brother Andrey reigned as the Prince of Vladimir.
However, when Khan Mongke ascended as ruler of the Mongol Empire, Andrey refused to travel
to Karakorum to have his Princeship confirmed.
As a result, the Golden Horde launched a punitive expedition into Vladimir, chasing Andrey out
of his lands and forcing him into exile in Sweden.
In his place, Nevsky was confirmed as the Mongol-appointed Prince of Vladimir, as a
reward for his continued loyalty.
Nevsky paid off the confidence the Mongols showed him in dividends, defending their authority
whenever the need arose.
In 1259, when the citizenry of Novgorod revolted and refused to pay tribute to the Khans, Nevsky
marched into the city with soldiers, forcing his own people to obey their Mongol masters
by force of arms.
Nevsky died in 1263, taken by illness while journeying home from one of his trips to pay
homage to the Khan in Sarai.
The Rus he left behind was a complex one.
On one hand, invaders from the west were defeated, their religion saved in the process.
On the other, it had been utterly ravaged by Mongols, becoming subjects of a foreign
Empire.
The legacies of St. Olga, Vladimir the Great, and Yaroslav the Wise remained in the form
of their faith, culture, and identity they had helped build.
But as the various Rus Princes slowly reconsolidated their lands and power under the watchful eye
of Mongol overlordship, it became clear that the age of the Kievan Rus was long behind
them, and a new era had begun in what would become Russia.
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