Battle of the Terek River

Tokhtamysh recovered from the Kondurcha, sought allies against Timur, among them the Mamluks of Egypt, and in 1394 his troops raided Shirvan through Derbent. In the spring of 1395 Timur marched north through the Derbent pass, destroyed the khan's vanguard on the Koysu and reached the Terek, where Tokhtamysh had fortified himself behind carts and shields. After manoeuvres along the river — Timur marched along it towards the region of Julat for provisions and turned back when Tokhtamysh followed him — the two armies camped face to face on Tuesday, 22 Jumada II 797 AH; Tokhtamysh's night attack came to nothing, and the battle was fought the next morning. By the weekday that was Wednesday, 14 April 1395; the conversion in the standard Russian translation of Yazdi gives 15 April, the date most often cited. Where exactly the armies met is disputed: Kh. A. Khizriev places the field on the lower Terek, between the stanitsas of Shchedrinskaya and Shelkovskaya, other historians much further upstream.

Timur himself led the 27 picked companies (koshuns) of his reserve against the enemy's right wing and was nearly overwhelmed when it rallied and struck back: his amirs and their men dismounted and held their ground behind shields and captured wagons until Prince Muhammad Sultan charged with fresh troops and the Horde's wings gave way. According to Ibn Arabshah, a quarrel among Tokhtamysh's emirs made one of them leave the field with his men; according to Mamluk envoys, a bey named Aktau left the battle with thousands of warriors.

Tokhtamysh fled north. Timur's armies hunted down his followers along the Volga, then ravaged the Russian borderland around Yelets, whose prince was taken captive — Timur's chronicler even speaks of a march on Moscow — before turning south. Moscow tradition attributed the deliverance to the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God, solemnly met in the city on 26 August 1395, the very day, it says, that Timur turned back, though this story appears in the sources only later. Timur then sacked Tana (Azak) and in the winter of 1395–1396 destroyed Hajji Tarkhan (Astrakhan) and burned Sarai. The Golden Horde never regained its former power; Tokhtamysh, deposed by Edigu and Timur Qutlugh, ended his life as a fugitive and was killed in Siberia in 1406.