Battle of the Kondurcha River

Tokhtamysh owed his throne to Timur, but once master of the whole Golden Horde he claimed Khwarazm and Azerbaijan: in the mid-1380s he sacked Tabriz, and in the winter of 1387–1388, while Timur was in Iran, his troops raided Transoxiana as far as Bukhara. Timur resolved to strike at the heart of the Horde. On 19 January 1391 (12 Safar 793, according to Yazdi) he set out from Tashkent and for months marched north through the steppes — in the spring his men carved an inscription on a rock in the Ulytau hills, the Karsakpay inscription, found in 1935 and now in the Hermitage. Reaching the headwaters of the Tobol, he turned west, crossed the Yaik (Ural) upstream of the place where Tokhtamysh awaited him and pursued the retreating khan towards the Volga.

Tokhtamysh accepted battle on the Kondurcha on 15 Rajab 793, a Monday, in the account of Timur's historian Sharaf ad-Din Yazdi: by the usual conversion 18 June 1391, by the weekday 19 June. Timur drew up his army in seven corps, keeping a reserve under his own command; the Horde's wings overlapped his line and at first pressed hard on his flanks, but his corps held, Prince Muhammad Sultan broke the enemy's centre, and Tokhtamysh fled. Seven men out of every ten were sent in pursuit and drove the fugitives against the Volga, where many perished, and Timur camped on its bank at Urtupa.

Both sides lost heavily; a later author, Muhammad ibn Muhammad of Adrianople, put the Horde's losses at over 100,000, a figure that cannot be checked. The victory did not end the war. The Jochid princes Timur Qutlugh and Kunche Oghlan and the emir Edigu, who had joined Timur against Tokhtamysh, were allowed to go and gather their people, and Timur Qutlugh and Edigu set up as rivals to the khan, while Tokhtamysh soon regained Sarai and renewed the struggle, which was decided on the Terek four years later.