Later writers greatly inflated the significance of this battle, for it did not liberate Russia from the Horde, even if it was the first important victory over the Tatars since 1240. Mamai’s defeat led to his elimination from the politics of the Horde, and in 1382 the new Khan Tokhtamysh led a massive army toward the north. This time Dmitrii chose to retreat, and Tokhtamysh took Moscow and burned it to the ground. Dmitrii did not live long enough to see the outcome, for he died in 1389. Two years later the great conqueror Tamerlane, already master of Central Asia, turned against the Golden Horde and defeated Tokhtamysh. This was a mortal blow, coming at a time of increasing dissension among the various chiefs and tribal groupings within the Horde. Raids and even major campaigns by the Tatars continued, but without great success. In the 1430s the Horde began to break up, although the theoretical supremacy of the senior khanate over Russia lasted until 1480.
The principalities of northeastern Rus which ultimately came under the rule of the Moscow princes were not the only components that formed the Russian state. The other was Novgorod, which had already begun to form its own style of government in the twelfth century. Its distinctive economy, founded on the forests of the north and the commercial tie to the German Hansa, gave it a wealth that its neighbors must have envied. In addition, its location meant that subordination to the Golden Horde remained very theoretical. During most of the thirteenth century the Novgorodians chose to recognize the sovereignty of the Grand Prince of Vladimir, who sent a viceroy to lead the city-state’s army, but they now made a formal treaty with their sovereign. In the 1290s Novgorod’s people further altered the balance of power. From then on they elected their posadnik, their mayor, for a term of one year from the “Council of Lords,” which was formed of representatives of each of the five “ends” of the town. As the same man could be reelected, the new system made the city’s government even more oligarchic but also more independent of the prince or his deputies.
The political history of Novgorod is recorded in its chronicles and those of its neighbors, but the daily life of the city is also known to us as that of no other medieval Russian town. Starting in the 1930s Soviet archeologists made it into one of the most extensive medieval sites ever excavated, unintentionally aided by the German Wehrmacht, which destroyed most of the modern city in World War II. Dozens of medieval houses and workshops, barns, and midden heaps have given a remarkable picture of the life of medieval Novgorod. The water-logged soil of the site preserves organic material, including the log-paved roads that crisscrossed the town. Leather shoes, wooden vessels and tools, as well as objects of stone, glass, and metal have come to light. The log roads also provide the archeologist with an invaluable tooclass="underline" a sequence of logs that form a database for dendrochronology (dating by tree-rings). As such, finds can be dated in Novgorod with a great degree of accuracy. Perhaps the most remarkable and wholly unexpected find came in 1951, when a student working on the site found a round cylinder of birchbark encased in mud. Her presence of mind led to the discovery that the bark, when unrolled, had writing on it, which was incised with a sharp pointed stylus. This was the first of the birch bark letters, of which thousands now exist from Novgorod and hundreds from other medieval Russian sites. These were not literary compositions but simply letters, orders to servants, reminders from wives to their husbands, labels for baskets (such as “rye” or “barley”), and records of debts.
Figure 2. A Child’s Writing Exercise from Medieval Novgorod (Birch Bark Document 210).
All of these finds show us a thickly populated town. Houses were built in yards enclosed by wooden fences with a larger house for the master and often several smaller huts of servants or artisans. Each house had barns and storage sheds for animals, fodder, and the tools of the household. Houses of great boyars and their dependents were jumbled together with humble homesteads with a workshop to sustain a smith or carpenter. Children’s toys and the ever-present spindles record the occupations of children and the spinning and weaving of the households’ women. Some of the birch bark documents are more exotic, depicting the exercises of children learning to write and occasional prayers and letters between nuns. They reveal a society with a certain basic literacy, where men and women could write simple letters, even if most could not copy or read complex religious texts in Church Slavic.
Novgorod was a major cultural center, and the considerable manuscript production of its cathedral clergy and monasteries remain to this day as testimony of their activity. Church building reflected Novgorod’s wealth as did its patronage of icon painters from faraway Byzantium, like Theophanes the Greek (circa 1350–1410). Theophanes is responsible for some of the more remarkable frescoes from medieval Novgorod, as far as we can judge from what has escaped the ravages of time, warfare, and politics. His images create a sense of mystic light around his subjects, perhaps the influence of the mystical teaching among Byzantine monks known as hesychasm.
Novgorod’s location put it in a different international context from Vladimir and Moscow. A generation before the Mongol invasion, Novgorod was confronted with enemies as fierce and perhaps ultimately more dangerous than the nomads of Inner Asia, the Christian Crusaders of western Europe. They came in two groups. The larger, but perhaps the less dangerous to Novgorod, were the German crusading orders, the Teutonic Knights, and the Swordbearers. These were monastic orders of celibate warriors, formed into a community to fight against the opponents of Christianity. At the end of the twelfth century, pushed out of Palestine by the victorious Muslims, they turned their attention to the east shore of the Baltic Sea, where several of the native peoples of the area, the Old Prussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Finns remained pagans, untouched by Christianity in either western or eastern form. There the Teutonic Knights received land on the border of the Prussian lands from a sympathetic Polish duke and built their first castles. Systematically they subdued and exterminated the Prussians in the name of Christ, bringing German peasants to settle in their place. Within two generations Prussia, the East Prussia of twentieth century politics, was a German territory ruled by the order.
Prussia would eventually develop into a problem for Poland, but for Novgorod it was their allies that were the threat. Around 1200 German knights landed near Riga and began to subdue the lands of today’s Latvia and Estonia, turning the natives into their tenants and eventually serfs. All power rested in the hands of the archbishop of Riga and the order of the Swordbearers. The Swordbearers joined the Teutonic Knights in 1237 as the subordinate Livonian order, cementing German rule. The resultant social and ethnic hierarchy lasted through various political changes into the twentieth century.
For the moment the Novgorodians found a new and dynamic neighbor in place of the weak Estonian tribes of earlier centuries. To makes things worse, another crusade was afoot. Sweden was also moving east, gradually conquering the Finnish tribes. As they moved east along the coast of Finland, the Swedes began to threaten Novgorod’s vital trade route to the Hansa that ran through the Gulf of Finland and the Neva river. In 1240 the Swedish Earl Birger, a man more powerful than the King of Sweden himself, landed an army in Novgorod’s territory on the south bank of the Neva. The local Finnish tribe, the Ingrians, sent south to Novgorod for help, and the city’s newly elected prince, Alexander of Vladimir, came out to fight. The Swedes were driven into the sea, and Alexander for ever after was known as Alexander of the Neva, or Alexander Nevsky. Two years later he defeated the Livonian knights on the ice of Lake Chud, on the Estonian border, in a battle that was of little significance at the time, but eventually made great twentieth century cinema: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 epic with Sergei Prokofiev’s music. The medieval Novgorodians, however, knew what was important. Prince Alexander’s epithet remained Nevsky, in memory of the truly crucial defense of Novgorod’s trade, while his defeat of the knights was relegated to a few lines in the chronicle. The Livonian knights had other concerns, which distracted their attention away from the rich and powerful Novgorod. This concern was Lithuania, the main enemy of the knights in both Prussia and Livonia.