Battle of Kulikovo

Since 1359 the Golden Horde had been torn by a long struggle for the throne, the ‘Great Troubles’, and in its western half power lay with Mamai, a beklyarbek who, not being a descendant of Genghis Khan, ruled through puppet khans. Moscow broke with him in 1374, and in 1378 Dmitry defeated his general Begich on the Vozha. In 1380 Mamai marched against Moscow himself, demanding tribute at the rate paid under Khan Jani Beg and counting on Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania and — according to the Moscow chronicles — on Oleg of Ryazan. Dmitry gathered his forces at Kolomna, crossed the Oka near the mouth of the Lopasnya at the end of August and marched south to keep his enemies from joining; on the morning of 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, his army crossed the Don in thick fog and drew up on the open field at the mouth of the Nepryadva.

The earliest accounts say little about the battle itself: a long and fierce fight ended in the flight of the Tatars, many of whom were cut down or drowned in the river; Prince Fyodor of Beloozero and his son Ivan fell in the first clash. The detailed picture familiar today — the single combat of the monk Alexander Peresvet with a Tatar champion, the ambush regiment of Vladimir Andreyevich of Serpukhov and Dmitry Bobrok-Volynsky that turned the tide, the grand prince fighting in the ranks and found after the battle stunned under a felled birch — comes from the later Tale of the Rout of Mamai, whose reliability historians judge differently. The size of the armies is unknown: the chronicles credit Dmitry with 150,000–200,000 men and more, figures that are greatly exaggerated, and modern estimates of his army range from no more than 36,000 (A. N. Kirpichnikov) to 6,000–8,000 (O. V. Dvurechensky, who puts Mamai's force at about 7,000).

Jogaila, who had not reached the field, turned back. Mamai fled; soon afterwards, facing Tokhtamysh on the Kalka, he was deserted by his remaining emirs, and he was killed in the Crimea at the end of 1380 or early in 1381. As A. A. Gorsky notes, it was Tokhtamysh, who reunited the Horde, that gained most from Mamai's defeat: in 1382 he burned Moscow and restored the tribute, and dependence on the Horde ended only a century later. Yet the battle raised Moscow's prestige among the Russian principalities and gave rise to an unprecedented cycle of writings — the chronicle tale, the Zadonshchina and the Tale of the Rout of Mamai.