1.67 - The Mongol Western Campaigns II - The Fall of Rus

[00:00:26] Hello and welcome to the Russian Empire History Podcast, the history of all the peoples of the Russian Empire. I'm your host JP Bristow and this is Season 1, The Forest, The Steppe and the Birth of the Russian Empire. And Episode 67, The Mongol Western Campaigns Part 2, The Fall of Rus.

[00:00:50] Before we begin, a big thank you to New Boyar Trygve. Thank you once again to everyone subscribing through Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Just a quick note concerning chronology in this episode. The Mongol-aligned historians like Rashad al-Din and Juwini

[00:01:17] tried to reconstruct the Western Campaigns into a coherent, linear, chronological narrative. Batu did this, then he did this, and then he did that. We know that that was not the case. Batu divided his army and some campaigns took place concurrently. Because the other sources, such as the Rus Chronicles or writings by

[00:01:45] European travelers who visited later, do not provide a full picture of the campaigns, and because scholars have been unable to match some names used to places, it's not been possible to fully recreate an accurate picture.

[00:02:05] So, for instance, in this episode, we will be discussing the Mongol attacks on Rus, the continuing campaign to fully subjugate the Western Steppe, and mentioning a campaign against the North Caucasus. According to the historians mentioned, Batu's final campaign against the Kipchaks came in between the campaigns against

[00:02:32] Suzdalia and against Southern Rus, but it's very likely that it was at least partially concurrent to the Suzdalian campaign. In any case, this difference is not critical to understanding what's happened, and the linear narrative does make it easier to follow, so mostly I've gone along with this structure as well.

[00:02:59] So we left off with the Mongol army count somewhere around where the city of Voronezh stands today, which was in the Gnezesstvo of Rezan. By now, the Rus must have suspected that an invasion was likely. For the last year, Bulgar refugees had been arriving in Rus' cities.

[00:03:26] Friar Julian met them on the road everywhere he travelled, and recounted his conversations with them about the Mongols. But while they may have thought that a war with the Mongols was on the cards, they do not appear to have been overly worried. Maybe this was a consequence of not being especially impressed with the Mongols the last time they thought, for reasons we discussed a couple of episodes back.

[00:03:55] Or maybe it was a complacent assumption that steppe nomads would always fight like steppe nomads, and Rus had consistently had the better of them for a couple of centuries already. As we've previously mentioned, conflict with the Pechenegs and the Paulotsy had become fairly predictable.

[00:04:21] If there was a change in Rus' leadership, the nomads would attack in the spring, when the ground ferned up and fodder for their horses was available, and before the summer dryness. They would raid, rather than trying to take the cities. For sure, this involved destruction of property and the slaughter, rape, captivity and enslavement of people,

[00:04:48] but it was aimed at establishing the basis of the relationship between the nomads and the settled peoples, rather than conquering new territory. Maybe the Rus thought it would be the same with the Mongols, even after the destruction of Bulgaria. Maybe they thought they had time until the spring to prepare.

[00:05:12] But the Mongols were far better organised and more ambitious than any of the steppe peoples the Rus had previously encountered. They had already taken the Bulgars by surprise when they attacked in the autumn, and now they would shock the Rus' by attacking them in the winter. To be sure, the Rus were familiar with winter campaigning. We've already discussed some of the advantages of winter warfare in Rus'.

[00:05:42] But that was the Knazes campaigning against each other, not foreign invaders. According to the refugees that Friar Julian spoke to on the roads around Susdal in the autumn of 1237, the Mongols had already smashed the Madhyars, Bulgars and other kingdoms.

[00:06:11] And as far as he could make out, the Mongol army had split into parts. One on the Bulgars that would come to Susdalia from the east, one in the south on the borders of Rezan, and a third on the Don. This may or may not have been accurate. It could simply have been the case that the refugees thought there were Mongols everywhere. However, given the issues that could arise with winter feed,

[00:06:41] it's probably very likely that we are indeed talking about an attack in depth, with the Mongols spread out into smaller contingents, with reserve forces and rotational forces after combat. According to the chronicles, Batu sent a woman sorceress and two men to demand the Knazes of Rezan hand over a tithe of everything, property, people and horses,

[00:07:11] which were divided by colour, black, brown, roan and piebald. The Knazes forwarded the demand to the great Knaz Yury in Vladimir without making a reply and begged him for assistance. Some historians consider this part to be a later addition and argue that the decision to conquer Rezan had already been made and the Mongol army was already moving.

[00:08:09] The Mongols marched as soon as the river ice could bear the weight of a crossing. They took Rezan's towns, Pronsk, Belgorod, Brice of Glebo, Izyaslavets. They seized the food supplies, captured the men and formed them into work groups for sieges and pushed the women and children onto the roads as refugees. They would increase the burden on the next town and make the Mongols' job easier.

[00:08:36] The army reached Rezan on 16th December 1237. According to Rashad-ud-din, the siege lasted just three days. Other sources say seven. According to the Yuan Shi, the Mongols brought a Tangut engineer with them with siege engines. The Russian chronicler writes that the city fell on 21st December.

[00:09:07] The Mongols burned the whole town, killed the Khnyaz, Yuri and his wife, the men of the town, their wives and their children, cut down monks, nuns and the hierarchs with a sword, raped the nuns and priests' wives. With Rezan destroyed, the Mongols turned towards Suzdal and Vladimir,

[00:09:33] mopping up the remaining towns of the Khnyazistva of Rezan as they went. They followed along the Okha river, which brought them to Kalomna, considered one of Rus' strongest fortresses. In response to the Mongols, Syevolod had already dispatched his voivoda, Yerime Glebovich, to reinforce Kalomna, which was held by Roman Ingvarovic, the brother of the now-deceased Khnyaz of Rezan.

[00:10:05] It also seems that other remnants of Rezan forces, including a contingent from Pronsk, led by a voivoda named Kier Mikhailovich, had gathered there. When word of the fall of Rezan was brought to Yuri and Vladimir, he decided to give battle and send a large army to Kalomna, led by his son, Syevolod. The chronicle calls it all the people,

[00:10:32] as well as supporting forces from Novgorod. As usual, it is difficult to accurately estimate how big this army was, but it seems likely that the combined Rus' forces at Kalomna were comparable to the approaching Mongol army.

[00:10:59] All the Russian chronicles and all the other sources agree that it was the biggest battle of the whole invasion, the only major battle with the Mongols since the Kalko River. The sparse information in both the chronicles and the Mongol-aligned sources provide us with little detail, but are clear that the battle was hard fought, with substantial losses on both sides.

[00:11:27] The Mongols drew the Rus' out of position with the traditional feigned retreat and attempted to envelop them with their wings, but the Rus' fought free. Syevolod and his surviving men abandoned the field to retreat to Vladimir. The surviving men of Rezan, led by Roman Ingvarovich, threw themselves against the Mongols to buy their comrades time to reform,

[00:11:55] with Roman personally killing Chinggis' son, Kul Khan, before he and his men were slaughtered. Kul Khan would be the only Chinggisid to die in battle in the whole of the Western campaigns. Finally, after severe losses to both attackers and defenders, the Rus' broke and the remaining soldiers fled into Kolomna.

[00:12:24] And that is all we know about the course of the battle that determined the fate of Rus'. If we ask the question of why Rus' collapsed so quickly when Batu had previously struggled for years in his efforts to conquer the West, it comes down to this battle. The Mongols had managed to land a knockout blow in a decisive battle. The bulk of the professional armies of Suzdalia and Novgorod,

[00:12:52] the dominant force in Rus' over recent decades, was dead. There was nowhere north-eastern Rus' could get another army. All that was left to defend their cities was small garrisons and peasant militias. The Mongols had suffered almost as much, but Batu still had other armies in the field

[00:13:22] and forces resting on the Volga that could be rotated to the front. Professional and experienced troops, not militias gathered in a panic in the middle of winter. The conquest of Suzdalia was now just a matter of time. Kolomna and the survivors of the Rus' army fell within days. Next, Batu moved on Moscow. The Chronicler writes, The same winter the Tatars took Moscow

[00:13:52] and killed the voivoda, Filip Nianca, and its ruler, Vladimir, burned down the city and the churches and the monasteries and all the settlements and took all the property.

[00:14:06] From Moscow,

[00:14:36] the route to Vladimir and Suzdal lay open. Yuri abandoned his city. He left a small Druzhina with his sons, Szevilod and Mistislav, and told the people he was going to meet his brothers, Yaroslav and Sviatoslav, and gather an army from Yaroslavl. The Mongols marched swiftly from Moscow to Vladimir and demanded the Grand Knaz appear. The citizens refused to open the gate

[00:15:04] and shot arrows back at the Mongols, who quickly surrounded the city and established their siege. A second army was sent in the direction of Suzdal, which surrendered after just a couple of days. Other detachments spread out through the countryside, pillaging as they went. Duwaini describes the siege of Vladimir, quote, They went into the lands of the Rus and conquered it

[00:15:34] as far as the city of Vladimir. The townspeople were as numerous as ants or locusts, and it was surrounded by forests so dense a snake could not crawl into it. The princes surrounded the city and first built wide roads from each side so that three or four wagons could go side by side. After that, they put catapults in front of the city walls. After a few days, all that was left of the city was its name.

[00:16:04] They found a lot of loot there. They ordered that the people's right ears be cut off and they counted 270,000 ears. End quote. 270,000 is, of course, a gross exaggeration, but the city would have been packed with refugees making its population bigger than it usually was. The chronicles paint a fairly similar picture.

[00:16:33] They tell how the Mongols threw up a timber fence surrounding the city overnight and then broke down the walls with several days of assault by stone-throwing machines. When the city walls broke, the Mongols filled in the moat with logs and crossed into the city, breaking through it several points simultaneously and setting it on fire. Rashid Adin states that the whole thing was over in eight days.

[00:17:02] The chronicle continues the story, quote, and from there the Tatars spread through all the lands. End quote.

[00:17:41] Batu's first priority was to find the missing Grand Knazjuri. No one left in Vladimir knew where he was. Batu sent men hunting eastwards and in the directions of Rostov and Yaroslavl. Meanwhile, he carried on seizing towns along the Volga. Within a month, he had taken in Yaroslavl, Garadets on the Volga, Kostroma, Galic, Pereyaslavl's Aleski,

[00:18:11] Tbyr, Yuryev, Volokolamsk and Dmitrov. The chronicles don't even try to list the smaller towns. This meant that the Mongols had captured all the supplies they could need. The chronicles disagree over what happened to the towns. It's clear that cities that fought were destroyed. But if they didn't, what happened? In one chronicle, Suzdal is spared. In another,

[00:18:40] destroyed. It's very likely that the chroniclers were unable to get accurate information for some time after the invasion, not to mention the rumours that would have been rampant. Batu himself led the armies that took Yuryev, Periaslavl, Dmitrov and Tvia, where he killed the Knaz, and then carried on to Torzhoch. Burunday,

[00:19:10] one of the generals, not a Chinggisid, had meanwhile found Yuri. Yuri had underestimated the Mongols once again. Assuming that the steppe riders would avoid entering the winter forest, he had camped out in the woods with inadequate guards. The traditional narrative in the Russian historiography is that he was expecting reinforcements from his brothers and waiting

[00:19:40] for his forces to assemble, but it's difficult to reconcile this version of events with the information recorded in the chronicles and histories. First, Yuri had good reason to consider the forest of defence. It was pretty impenetrable at the best of times and still harder under the winter snows. There were no people there and that meant no food or other resources if he wanted

[00:20:10] to support an army and if he was expecting a smaller contingent, what was he planning to do with it? So, as embarrassing as it might have been for Yuri and the chroniclers, it seems more likely that he was simply trying to hide in the woods until the Mongols went away. According to the Southerners Chronicle, the great Knaz gathered all his

[00:20:39] troops around him and had no guard posts and the lawless Brundi rode them down and killed Knaz Yuri himself. According to the Novgorod Chronicles, the last of the northeastern warrior elite met a slightly less ignominious end.

[00:21:09] Yuri sent one of his captains out with 3,000 men to scout. They soon ran into the Mongols and returned to tell the Knaz that they were already close. When he heard the news, Yuri mounted up with his brother Sviatoslav and his nephews Vesilik, Siavolod and Vladimir and all his men. But before he could form up his divisions, the Mongols suddenly attacked.

[00:21:39] After a fierce fight, the men fled from the invaders and the great Knaz Yuri Sivolović and many of his men died on the Sitte River. Some historians would argue that the southern Rus chronicle is likely closer to the truth because the writer had less of a stake in Yuri's reputation than the chroniclers of his own Knazistva.

[00:22:09] And Rashad Adin simply comments that the ruler of this region fled into the woods. He was caught and killed. With the death of Yuri, organised resistance in north eastern Rus was essentially over. Batu's army had already invested Dazhuk, which had refused to surrender. It held out for twelve days, hoping for

[00:22:38] relief from Novgorod that never came as it watched the other Mongol armies arrive to join Batu. Fell on March the 5th and the Mongols gave a demonstration of destruction to discourage anyone else. According to the chronicles, they killed all the men and women and then hunted down and killed any of its townspeople who had fled elsewhere.

[00:23:09] Batu conferred with the other Mongol leaders and they decided to return to the steppe, each two men separately. Capturing every town or fortress that they found in their way. The reason for the withdrawal was probably that despite their overall success, the Mongols had had a serious mauling at Kastramar and Batu wanted to rest his troops and perhaps meet up with further reinforcements from the east.

[00:23:39] In the event, Batu encountered strong resistance resistance at one fortified town, Kazielsk, built in a highly defendable position on a hill next to the Zhidra river, which was in flood from the snow melting. The conditions made it difficult for siege engines to approach and Batu's army was apparently too weakened to take it on itself. The defenders even managed to ride out and raid the Mongols

[00:24:09] a couple of times. So Batu had to wait for reinforcements. An overwhelming force finally arrived and succeeded in taking the town after two months and the Mongols losing 4,000 men. Batu ordered the whole population killed, including babies, and burned the town to the ground. The army moved on to the Volga and

[00:24:39] the Mongols rested. The first Rus campaign was complete. The strongest Knazostwa had been devastated, its greatest cities and fortresses destroyed, and its Knaz and most of his family killed. It had taken just five months.

[00:25:27] The Chronicle laconically states, the summer of the same year was peaceful. In reality, Batu simply had different priorities. First, he needed to replenish and restore his troops. Although we get the impression of a lightning campaign and Suzdalian collapse, the Mongols had certainly lost thousands in the major battle at Kastrama, as well as taking what appears to be significant losses at several towns

[00:25:56] and fortresses that managed to put up a serious fight. And his primary target was to finalise the defeat of the Kipchaks and take full control of the Western Steppe. This may seem a bit of a strange statement if you're used to the traditional Russian and European narrative in which Rus and then the other sedentary states beyond it, Hungary, Poland, are assumed to be the Mongols'

[00:26:26] main target. But that was not the case. The Mongols certainly wanted to control Rus. they were well-informed and valued trade like all steppe peoples. They knew that possessing Rus meant access to the lucrative Baltic trade. But the Rus would be ruled as vassals, through local lords who acknowledged Mongol suzerainty and paid tribute. The steppe and its peoples would be integrated

[00:26:56] into the Mongol Empire itself and ruled directly. So the next strike was against the Yemek holdouts led by their Khan, Batchman, who were in the Lower Don region. This campaign was led by the future Great Khan, Monke. The sources provide us with similar descriptions of events but varying chronologies,

[00:27:25] placing the campaign somewhere between 1238 and 1240. That is, as already noted, this campaign either took place at the same time Batu was fighting in Suzdalia or just afterwards. Druhaini states that when the Mongols had subdued the Kipchaks, they found that one by the name of Batchman had escaped. He gathered

[00:27:54] refugees and they, says the historian, lived like wolves, roaming around creating evil. people. So the Mongols searched for him but were unable to find him. Sending Monke with his fresh tumens was evidence of how seriously the Mongols took Batchman. Monke appears to have succeeded in dividing Batchman from his allies, the Yass,

[00:28:24] Olbuddik and Kachya Kipchaks, who he subdued separately. Batchman was reduced to hiding in the woods along the lower Volga, constantly moving between camps. So Monke ordered the construction of a fleet of ships, supposedly each capable of carrying 100 warriors, but realistically less than that if we include their horses.

[00:28:56] They began working their way along both shores of the river. According to the story, one day they arrived at a camp that appeared to have been abandoned just that morning. An old woman was found nearby and confirmed that it had been Batchman's camp and that he had moved only a short way away to an island. The Mongols had left their boats behind them, but as they looked across the water to the island,

[00:29:25] a strong wind came up and drove the water back. Monke immediately ordered his men to ride for the island. Batchman was taken by surprise. He was captured and his men killed. The women, children and goods were seized. The Mongols then returned to the shore before the wind dropped and allowed the water back into its normal course. Batchman was brought to Monke and asked for the honour of being allowed to kill

[00:29:55] himself, but Monke ordered his brother Bucheck to execute him. With the main Kipchak resistance force dealt with, the Mongols moved on to mopping up the rest. The campaign penetrated into the North Caucasus and subjugated some of the peoples there, but due to the names used, it's not possible to accurately determine who the records are talking about.

[00:30:25] The Mongols continued their campaign across the western steppe, subjugating tribe after the tribe of the Kipchaks. Soon, only a handful remained independent, including the people of Kortian Khan. Fleeing west, they asked the king of Hungary for shelter. Bela IV met them at his borders with his church leaders. The 40,000 Kipchaks led

[00:30:55] by Kortian accepted Catholicism, were baptised and admitted to Hungary as direct subjects of the king. This would cause problems in the future by disturbing the balance of power and upsetting the Hungarian nobility, leading to a revolt that saw Kortian and other Kipchak leaders killed and the people driven out towards the Balkans.

[00:31:51] With the resistance of the Kipchaks broken, Monke and Goyuk were given new targets in the North Caucasus, while Batu turned once again to Rus. Rus. In the winter of 1239, he marched against Peryaslavl. If you recall all the way back to Vladimir the Great, and then down through his successors, Peryaslavl had been the keystone of Kiev's defences against the steppe, the centre of the

[00:32:21] lines of fortresses and walls built to keep the nomads out of Rus. As the defence of Rus against the steppe had been the primary task of the Knaz of Kiev for much of its history, this is likely where the strong tie between Kiev and Peryaslavl, and the idea that ruling in Peryaslavl was a stepping stone to Kiev had come from. So,

[00:32:50] taking Peryaslavl and breaking those defences was an obvious target for the Mongols that would open the way to Kiev, Chernikov and the western Knazistva. Batu began by picking off the fortresses before his forces rendezvoused again at the walls of Peryaslavl. Once again the siege was over in days, and according to the chronicle,

[00:33:20] the Mongols seized the city with their spears on 3rd of March 1239, to take in just a couple of months to knock out the sudden defences. In the autumn, Birkheg led his tumens to Chernikov. Michal of Chernikov was in Kiev, and so his brother Mstislav came to defend the city. The Mongols subjected

[00:33:50] it to the by-now familiar siege. The city was fenced off, and massive catapults and battering rams assembled. According to the chronicle, the catapults threw stones so large four strong men were to lift them into the machine. The city fell, the kniazes fled, the people were slaughtered, and his churches and monasteries looted. The Mongols then dealt with the other towns of the

[00:34:19] kniazesstwa. Novgorodsevskiy, Kutivu, Sirensk, and others resisted and were destroyed. Lyubech, Dibriansk, and some others surrendered and were spared. Then the Mongols returned to the steppe once more to rest. At the same time as this campaign, another Mongol contingent was subjugating Crimea.

[00:34:57] You'll note that by now we are several years into the campaign. Quite a large number of Genghisids are involved. They are a long way from the court back east where constant entry was required to maintain your position and many of the Genghisids had their own ambitions. Although they are now breaking through to large territorial conquests, they've also been fighting hard and taking losses.

[00:35:27] It's difficult to estimate how substantial those losses might have been since they were generally not recorded, but to illustrate the force that went on the Great Raid was two full-strength humans, so between 20 and 25,000. According to the source that recounts the ambush by the Bulgars, Subutay brought back just over 4,000 men. Our sources on

[00:35:56] Batu's campaign state that he had recruited all the men of military age from the Mordvins who had been vassals of the Bulgars and took them west to fight the Germans, probably meaning Poles and Lithuanians, where all of the Mordvins were killed. So it's reasonable for us to assume that Batu and the other Chinggisids sustained heavy losses throughout the Western campaigns, and it

[00:36:26] was perhaps inevitable that disagreements would arise and it seems they broke out round about this 1239-1240 period. It appears that Batu and Guiyuk, representing the Chaggisids, fell out over who should be in charge and as there was no one with sufficient authority to adjudicate their dispute with them in the west, they had to return along with several of the other

[00:36:56] Chinggisids to put it to the Kurultai. It's also quite likely that the other Chinggisids with Batu realised that the campaigns against the sedentary kingdoms lying beyond the Desh de Kibchak were going to take a major effort and they wanted to be sure that they would be adequately resourced and rewarded. The Kurultai confirmed Batu

[00:37:26] in his position as leader of the Western campaigns, but he also made moves to consolidate the forces available to him. Ogade was in ill health and his death would mean a new succession campaign and that could mean his Chinggisid allies going elsewhere. Upon returning to the west, Batu assigned a force to a commander called Bukdai and entrusted

[00:37:55] him with the conquest of Dagestan and Durbent. Then he withdrew Monke and his army from the North Caucasus and sent them towards southern Rus with orders to carry out a reconnaissance of Kiev.

[00:38:39] According to the Galician Valhian Chronicle, Monke came to the Dnieper and looked across at Kiev. He was surprised by its beauty and grandeur and sent his emissaries to the Knyas Mikhail. The Knyas and the townspeople were tempted by his offer, but in the end they did not listen. According to other chronicles, Mikhail ordered the emissaries be executed. Monke did not have a

[00:39:09] big enough army to take on Kiev alone and he withdrew into the steppe to wait for Batu. According to Rashad Adin, in the autumn of 1240, Batu and his brothers Kadhan, Buri and Bucheck went on a campaign against the Rus and the Chornik-Lubuki. They began by ravaging the Chornik-Lubuki in Porosia and taking

[00:39:38] their town of Torchysk. Then they marched on Kiev. Despite spending years fighting his fellow Rus for the city, Mikhail abandoned Kiev before the Mongols even reached it, fleeing to Hungary with his son, supposedly to seek military aid. In typical Rus style, Rostislav Mstislavich of Smalensk immediately declared himself

[00:40:08] Knyaz of Kiev, but was promptly expelled by Daniel Romanovich of Halich Daniel obviously didn't want to risk getting caught in Kiev himself, so he appointed his voivode Dimitra to defend the city, left him a small garrison and returned to Halich. the Mongols to the chronicle nothing could be

[00:40:38] heard except for the creaking of their carts, the roaring of his great number of camels and the neighing of his horses and all the land of Rus was full of his soldiers. The city was surrounded. Batu's men battered the walls for days and nights until they broke. They stormed the city and threw the defenders from the walls. The people of Kiev retreated to the upper town and tried to shelter in St. Sophia's and

[00:41:18] old young and old alike stripping the churches and monasteries of gold jewels and icons. But Batu ordered that the wounded voivode Dimitra not be killed in honour of his bravery. The more contemporary chronicles do not tell us the dates of the siege. Later chronicles give clearly incorrect timelines. Rashid

[00:41:48] Adin said that it took nine days to take the great city of the Rus which we can assume was Kiev. November 19th has become the traditional date of its fall although we do not know the exact day. We do know that the destruction was immense. Although not utterly destroyed as Bila had been, the devastation came close. Giovanni de Pian del Carpini passed through almost

[00:42:18] two decades later. He wrote quote it. The Mongols went against Ruthenia and committed a great massacre in the lands of Ruthenia, destroyed the city and fortresses, killed the people. They besieged Kiev, the capital of Ruthenia, and after a long siege they took it and killed the city's residents. The city was large and crowded, but now it has been reduced to almost nothing. There are barely

[00:42:47] 200 houses and the people are in abject slavery. End quote. From maybe 50,000, little more than a thousand miserable residents remained. Only a handful of its public buildings, the dozens of churches, halls, and grand gateways were still standing. Kiev would take centuries to recover.

[00:43:41] After the capture of Kiev, word came from Ogadeh recalling Guyot and Monke with their tumens to Mongolia. This was quite a noticeable reduction in the forces available to Batu, but his campaign was still a long way from over. The Mongols once more divided their forces and advanced on Haluch full Hineo. According to Rashad Adin, the Mongols raided all the cities of Vladimir

[00:44:11] and conquered the fortresses and regions in their way. Once again, the Knaz, Daniel of Haluch, defaulted on his primary duty of defending his people. Instead, he fled to Hungary, leaving them to fend for themselves. Some tried to resist. In Kaminyets, Isyaslavl and Kolodiyazhin, the militias refused to open the gates, and their towns were therefore captured, sacked, and burned.

[00:44:41] Others surrendered or bought off Mongol detachments with grain. Some escaped assault because they were in the way of contingents that decided they were too small to take them on. Whether they met submission or resistance, the Mongols pressed on. Soon they reached Vladimir in Volhynia. According to Rashad Ardyn, the commanders Kadhan, Buri and Bucheck took the city in three days. The Russian

[00:45:11] chronicle says Batu came to Vladimir and captured it with a spear and killed people without mercy. Halich also tried to resist and was also quickly stormed and ravaged. The conquest was complete and Batu decided to winter his men in Galicia.

[00:45:48] It has been over a decade since Batu began his Western campaign. The peoples of the steppe, Kipchak, Yas, Yemex and other Turkic tribes have been fully subjugated and incorporated into the Ulus of Djorki or driven out of the steppe. At the periphery of the steppe, the major state of the forest steppe zone, Bulgaria, has been crushed and likewise incorporated into the Ulus.

[00:46:17] In the forest, what had been the strongest knyajstva of Rus, which also lay on the borders of the steppe, Vladimir Suzdal, Chernikiv, Halichvalinia and the Kiev lands have all been defeated and swept away. Novgorod is now the biggest city of the Rus. But the Rus lands will not be incorporated into the Ulus in the same way as the peoples of the steppe. They will become vassals,

[00:46:47] tributaries of Batu and his successors, but under their own rulers. Batu is not quite done with his western campaigns. The newly conquered peoples of the Ulus, Kipchaks, Bulgars and Mordwins, will form new troops to replace those lost or recalled to Mongolia, and he will continue westwards towards the end of the steppe. But despite further military

[00:47:17] success, he is already reaching the limits of what he is capable of holding. Before too long, he will be returning east to consolidate his khanate. Rus has a single entity, and we've already seen that it's not really clear that it was ever a united whole. no longer exists. The Knazes' rivalry for Kyiv will be replaced by rivalry for the favour of their Mongol rulers.

[00:47:47] And what now for the Rus people? Different paths and new identities lie ahead. Over the next few episodes, we will look at the historiography around the Mongol conquest and rule, and then we will look at the different Knazesstva, taking a step back to look at where they were on the eve of the conquest and what happens to them as they go their separate ways. Some of them will be dropping out of our

[00:48:17] story for a while, as we focus for the rest of this season on Mongol rule in the northeast and the rise of Muscovy. Thank you for listening, and until next time, goodbye. Bye.