River Vozha in the Ryazan region. Battle of the Vozha River

Everyone is well aware of the victory won by the united squads of Prince Dmitry Donskoy on Kulikovo Field in 1380. However, not everyone knows that it was preceded by another battle that went down in history as a battle on the Vozha River, and covered Russian weapons with no less glory. It took place two years earlier, and was the first major defeat of the Golden Horde, dispelling the myth of its invincibility.

Internal problems of the Golden Horde

By this time, the once united Horde, assembled into a powerful fist by its founder Genghis Khan, was experiencing a process of internal strife and civil strife. After the murder of Khan Berdibek in 1358, dozens of candidates fought for the right to possess supreme power.

Mamai, the son-in-law of the murdered ruler, was closest to achieving the goal, but, not being Genghis Khid, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, he did not have the right to become the ruler of the Horde, and skillfully promoted his protege Abdullah, whose pedigree met all the requirements.

Victory over the Bulgars

In the spring of 1376, Moscow Prince Dmitry Ivanovich, taking advantage of the weakening of the Golden Horde, caused by the turmoil described above, sent his squad headed by the voevoda DM. Bobrik-Volynsky on the middle Volga. There his army, defeating the Bulgars, who were Mamaia's henchmen, took a considerable amount of them from them, which amounted to 5,000 rubles, and, in addition, replaced the local customs officers with the people of the prince.

The news about this led Mamai into a rage. On his orders, one of the Tatar commanders called the Arab Shah ravaged the Novosilsk principality, which was in the upper reaches of the Oka and Don, and then, having defeated the Russian squads on the Pyan River, continued on its way to Ryazan and Nizhny Novgorod.

An absurd defeat

This defeat of Russian troops is rarely mentioned in popular historical literature. The reason for this is not only the tragedy of an event that cost the lives of several thousand warriors, but mainly that absurdity, the consequence of which it was. According to the testimony of the chroniclers, the situation was as follows.

Thanks to the fact that the news of the approach of the enemy was received long before its appearance, in Nizhny Novgorod it was possible to form and send to it a large, well-armed army, under the command of the Moscow prince Dmitri Ivanovich himself. However, the days passed, and the enemy did not appear. Not wishing to waste time, the prince returned to Moscow, and the command entrusted the young prince Ivan - the son of the Nizhny Novgorod ruler.

Prince Ivan, who had entrusted his army, took him to the bank of the river Pyan, and began to wait for the enemy, of which there was still nothing to be heard. Boredom and idleness have reigned in the camp, which, as is known, is the mother of all vices. Everyone began to spend time in his own way.

Someone went hunting in the nearby forests, someone is catching songbirds, and the vast majority of warriors were given the most drunkenness. It is this, as the ancient author admits with shame, was the reason for the bloody massacre that the Tartars suddenly appeared on the river bank.

The next campaign of the Horde

Mamai, encouraged by such a successful start of military operations, in two years moved thousands of troops under the command of an experienced commander Begich against the Moscow prince himself. The battle on the River Vozha in 1378 and became for him a very sad result of this campaign. Wishing to raise his prestige, he almost lost him.

The Vozha River, which is the right tributary of the Oka, flows in the Ryazan region, and has a very small length, hardly exceeding one hundred kilometers. It is known that in the area where the main Tatars' forces approached it in early August, there was only one ford that allowed them to cross to the opposite shore, but when approaching it, the Horde came upon a dense defensive barrier that had been exposed by Russian troops beforehand.

The military cunning of Prince Dmitry

According to the chroniclers, the battle on the Vozhe River had a favorable outcome for the Russians, largely thanks to skillful tactical actions undertaken by Prince Dmitry Ivanovich personally taking command. Taking advantage of the fact that Begich for several days did not dare to take active steps to master the crossing, he withdrew his troops a considerable distance, as if giving the shore to the enemy. The prince at the same time arranged his forces in the form of an arc with flanks projecting forward.

This was a cunning, which caught the Tatars. Crossing the river, and advancing forward, they were surrounded on three sides. Historians rightly point out the fact that the battle on the River Vozha in 1378 demonstrated the ability of Prince Dmitry to take advantage of the surrounding landscape. This same quality, he then brilliantly demonstrated on the Kulikovo field.

Defeat of the Tatar army

River Vozha (Ryazan region) in the place where the battle took place, flowed between the hilly banks, cut at the same time by deep ravines. Dmitry Ivanovich, taking his squad from the river, lured the enemy just to a site where his main striking force was cavalry, could not rush forward with a powerful onslaught. As a result, her attack was repulsed, which allowed the Russians to go into a counteroffensive.

The Horde fled, and many of them died, because the river Vozha, which was behind them, in this case, was a natural obstacle to retreat. In the ensuing ruthless felling of the escaping enemy, almost all the command of the Horde forces, including Begich himself, disgracefully died.

Complete destruction of all Tatars prevented only the night that had fallen. When, at dawn, the river Vozha emerged from the morning mist, not a single Horde was visible on either the right or the left bank of the river. All who were lucky enough to stay alive disappeared under the cover of darkness. The only thing that won the winners was a hastily abandoned train.

Results of the battle

The defeat of the Horde troops on the Vozha River had a number of important historical consequences. The main of them was that this first major victory of the troops of North-Western Russia over the Horde contributed to a rising morale among the people. She showed that the enemy, already almost a century and a half with impunity in the Russian lands, can be beaten, and eventually expelled from the homeland. In this sense, the River Vozha was the starting point from which the process began, the result of which was the overthrow of the Tatar-Mongol yoke.

In addition, the events described above have become in many ways fatal for the main enemy of Rus - Khan Mamai. After the defeat of the troops sent to them in 1378, the khan quickly lost prestige in the Horde, giving way to a younger and stronger competitor, Takhtamysh. Wanting to improve the situation and save the power that had escaped from power, Mamai undertook a successful campaign for the next year against the Ryazan principality, but already in 1380 was finally defeated by Dmitry Donskoy in the famous battle on the Kulikovo field.