Tokhtamysh sacks Moscow

Tokhtamysh, a descendant of Genghis Khan who had won power in the eastern Horde with Timur's help, took Sarai in 1380 and absorbed Mamai's following after his victory on the Kalka; he then demanded that the Russian princes submit to him. In the summer of 1382 he had Russian merchants seized at Bulgar so that no news would reach Moscow, crossed the Volga and launched a surprise raid. Dmitry of Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod sent his sons Vasily and Semyon to the khan, and Oleg of Ryazan showed him the fords across the Oka. Dmitry Donskoy, unable to gather a sufficient army, left for Kostroma; his cousin Vladimir Andreyevich withdrew to Volok and Metropolitan Cyprian to Tver. In the turmoil the Muscovites, who let only the grand prince's family and the metropolitan leave the city, accepted as their commander Ostey, a young Lithuanian prince and grandson of Algirdas.

The Tatars appeared before the walls on 23 August and for three days stormed the white-stone Kremlin, begun in 1367. The defenders answered with arrows, crossbows, stones, boiling water and pitch, and with ‘tyufyaks’ and ‘cannons’ — the earliest evidence of the use of firearms in Rus’; a cloth merchant named Adam shot a prince of the Horde from the Frolov gate. On 26 August the khan's envoys, accompanied by the Suzdal princes, promised the townspeople mercy if they came out with gifts; the gates were opened, Ostey was killed first, and the Tatars broke in, slaughtered the people who had sought refuge in the churches, plundered the treasury and burned the city together with the books brought there for safekeeping.

On the way to Moscow the khan had taken Serpukhov; after the fall of Moscow his detachments ravaged Pereslavl, Yuryev, Vladimir and Dmitrov, and on the way back Kolomna (the towns listed by the Novgorod chronicle). When Vladimir Andreyevich routed one of the detachments near Volok, Tokhtamysh withdrew, plundering the land of Ryazan despite Oleg's help. According to the chronicle tale, Dmitry paid one rouble for every eighty bodies buried, three hundred roubles in all — which would mean some 24,000 dead; other chronicles give smaller figures, which M. N. Tikhomirov considered more reliable. Dmitry resumed the tribute and in 1383 sent his son Vasily to the Horde as a hostage, but Tokhtamysh left the grand principality of Vladimir to the house of Moscow.