Today in history, on September 8, 1380, Russia began its long march to liberation from the Islamic Tatar yoke, by way of a battle that is as important to Russian history as the battle of Tours (732) and the siege of Vienna (1683) are to the West.
Although pagan when they conquered Russia around 1240, by 1300 the Mongols were thoroughly Islamized. Arabic was adopted, “the entire Muslim religious establishment of qadis, muftis, and the like arose in Sarai, the Golden Horde’s capital on the lower Volga,” and “sharia, Muslim religious law,” reigned supreme. “With this the Russo-Tatar conquest society entered the mainstream of Medieval Christian-Muslim frontier life,” that is, it entered into a familiar paradigm of enmity and war, punctuated only by vast sums of gold and slaves flowing from Russia to the Horde.
In 1327, Uzbek Khan’s cousin Shevkal—“the destroyer of Christianity,” according to a Russian chronicle—asked a boon of his khan: “allow me to go to Rus to destroy their Christian faith, to kill their princes and to bring you their wives and children.” Uzbek consented.
At the head of a vast horde, Shevkal invaded Russia “with great haughtiness and violence. He inaugurated great persecution of the Christians, [using] force, pillage, torture, and abuse.”
Nor were Russians ignorant of the reason behind their (renewed) sufferings: everywhere in their chronicles “they appear as defenders of the faith battling to save Christianity from marauding infidels driven by religious animosity.” Moreover, “Mongol atrocities” are always recorded “as incidents in a continuous religious war.”
When the Golden Horde’s infrastructure began to fracture from internal discord in 1359, the principality of Moscow (or Muscovy) began to defy its overlords. So, Khan Mamai, seeking to squash the rebels and “impose Islam on the Russians,” made for Moscow with, according to sources, some 100,000 Turco-Tatars in 1380. Boasting that they would put their swords “to the test for the Russian land and the Christian faith” against “the armor of the Moslems,” the Russians accepted the challenge.
Under the general leadership of Grand Prince Dmitri Ivanovich of Moscow, some 50,000 Russians went out and met the khan at Kulikovo Field, near the Don River and other tributaries. The opposing armies were so vast as to be spread out over eight miles. The Christians strategically positioned themselves between rivers and dense forests, thereby limiting the Tatar horsemen’s maneuvering and flanking abilities.
“I will neither protect my face nor hide in the rear, but let us all brothers fight together,” Dmitri said in response to his nobles’ pleas to stay out of harm’s way: “I want to die for Christianity ahead of anyone else, with deed as well as word, so that all others who see it will become bold.”
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