Battle On The Ice

The Battle on the Ice, also known as the Battle of Lake Peipus, took place on 5 April 1242. It was fought on the frozen Lake Peipus when the united forces of the Republic of Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal, led by Prince Alexander Nevsky, emerged victorious against the forces of the Livonian Order and Bishopric of Dorpat, led by Bishop Hermann of Dorpat.

The outcome of the battle has been traditionally interpreted by Russian historiography as significant for the balance of power between Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It is disputed whether the battle should be considered a "crusade" or not, and whether it represented a significant defeat for the Catholic forces during the Northern Crusades, thus bringing an end to their campaigns against the Orthodox Novgorod Republic and other Rus' territories. Estonian historian Anti Selart asserts that the crusades were not an attempt to conquer Rus', but still constituted an attack on the territory of Novgorod and its interests.

Background

The origins of the conflict that led to the battle of Lake Peipus in 1242 are unclear and controversial. An influential historiographical tradition has sought to link it to three earlier clashes in the region, all of which Aleksandr Yaroslavich was involved in: the alleged July 1240 Battle of the Neva (only attested in Rus' sources), the September 1240 Izborsk and Pskov campaign, and the winter 1240–1241 Votia campaign.

Researchers have endeavoured to look for Swedish motives to advance into the Neva river basin, often by reference to the letter which Pope Gregory IX sent to the archbishop of Uppsala at the end of 1237, suggesting that a crusade should be held in southwestern Finland against the Tavastians, who allegedly reverted to their pagan beliefs. On the assumption that a successful 'anti-Tavastian crusade' took place in 1238–39, the Swedes would have advanced further east until they were stopped by a Novgorodian army led by Alexander Yaroslavich, who defeated them in the Battle of the Neva in July 1240, centuries later receiving the nickname ''Nevsky''. Nevertheless, this hypothesis resulted in numerous unresolved issues. If the battle did take place, it was probably only a minor clash, in which religion played no role. Novgorod would have fought against this incursion to protect their monopoly on the Karelian fur trade, and for access to the Gulf of Finland.

Novgorodians had been attempting to subjugate, raid and convert the pagan Estonians (known as '' Chud'') since 1030, when they established the outpost ''Yuryev'' (modern Tartu). From the late 12th century, German-Livonian missionary and crusade activity in Livonia and Estonia caused tensions with the Novgorod Republic. The Estonians would sometimes ally with various Rus' principalities against the crusaders, since the eastern Baltic missions constituted a threat to Rus' interests and the tributary peoples. After Novgorod tried to subjugate Lett tribes south of Yuryev in 1212, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword captured Yuryev in 1224, which became the Bishopric of Dorpat's capital. The 1224 peace treaty that the Livonians signed with Pskov and Novgorod was in the latter's favour, and family ties were soon established: prince (died 1227) married off his daughter to Theoderic of Buxhövden, brother of bishops Albert of Riga and Hermann of Dorpat. Vladimir's son Yaroslav would later attempt to become the new prince of Pskov with the help of his brother-in-law, bishop Hermann of Dorpat; they failed in 1233, but succeeded during the September 1240 Izborsk and Pskov campaign.

Some time after, in the winter of 1240–1241, the combined forces of the Bishopric of Ösel–Wiek (in modern-day western Estonia) and the Livonian Order launched the 1240–1241 Votia campaign. This campaign may be properly considered a crusade in the sense of a missionary conquest of 'pagan' lands. It is unknown whether Votia was a tributary of Novgorod at the time, or only became one later. In either case, while the Sword Brothers and bishop Henry of Ösel–Wiek probably did not intend to attack Novgorod, their actions provoked a Novgorodian counterattack in 1241. The delayed response was a result of the internal strife in Novgorod. When they approached Novgorod itself, the local citizens recalled to the city 20-year-old Prince Alexander Nevsky, whom they had banished to Pereslavl earlier that year.

During the campaign of 1241, Alexander managed to retake both Votia and Pskov. Alexander then continued into Estonian-German territory. In the spring of 1242, the Teutonic Knights defeated a detachment of the Novgorodian army about south of the fortress of Dorpat (now Tartu). As a result, Alexander set up a position at Lake Peipus, where the battle would take place on 5 April 1242.

Accounts in primary sources

According to the Livonian Order's '' Livonian Rhymed Chronicle'' (written in the 1290s), lines 2235–2262:

According to the '' Laurentian continuation'' of the '' Suzdalian Chronicle'' (compiled in 1377; the entry in question may originally have been composed around 1310):

According to the Synod Scroll (Older Redaction) of the ''Novgorod First Chronicle'' (the entry of which has been dated to 1350):

Prince Alexander and all the men of Novgorod drew up their forces by the lake, at Uzmen, by the Raven's Rock; and the Germans 'Nemtsy''and the Estonians 'Chuds''rode at them, driving themselves like a wedge through their army. And there was a great slaughter of Germans and Estonians... they fought with them during the pursuit on the ice seven versts short of the Subol orth-westernshore. And there fell a countless number of Estonians, and 400 of the Germans, and they took fifty with their hands and they took them to Novgorod.

The Younger Redaction of the ''Novgorod First Chronicle'' (compiled in the 1440s) increased the amount of "Germans" (''Nemtsy'') killed from 400 to 500.

The '' Life of Alexander Nevsky'', the earliest redaction of which was dated by Donald Ostrowski to the mid-15th century, combined all the various elements of the ''Laurentian Suzdalian'', ''Novgorod First'', and ''Moscow Academic'' (Rostov-Suzdal) accounts. It was the first version to claim that the battle itself took place upon the ice of the frozen lake, that many soldiers were killed on the ice, and that the bodies of dead soldiers of both sides covered the ice with blood. It even states that 'There was ... a noise from the breaking of lances and a sound from the clanging of swords as though the frozen lake moved,' suggesting the clamor of battle somehow stirred the ice, although there is no mention of it breaking.

Scholarly reconstructions of the battle

On 5 April 1242 Alexander, intending to fight in a place of his own choosing, retreated in an attempt to draw the often over-confident Crusaders onto the frozen lake. Estimates on the number of troops in the opposing armies vary widely among scholars. A more conservative estimation by David Nicolle (1996) has it that the crusader forces likely numbered around 2,600, including 800 Danish and German knights, 100 Teutonic knights, 300 Danes, 400 Germans, and 1,000 Estonian infantry. The Novgorodians fielded around 5,000 men: Alexander and his brother Andrei's bodyguards (''druzhina''), totalling around 1,000, plus 2,000 militia of Novgorod, 1,400 Finno-Ugrian tribesmen, and 600 horse archers.

The Teutonic knights and crusaders charged across the lake and reached the enemy, but were held up by the infantry of the Novgorodian militia. This caused the momentum of the crusader attack to slow. The battle was fierce, with the allied Rus' soldiers fighting the Teutonic and crusader troops on the frozen surface of the lake. After a little more than two hours of close quarters fighting, Alexander ordered the left and right wings of his army (including cavalry) to enter the battle. The Teutonic and crusader troops by that time were exhausted from the constant struggle on the slippery surface of the frozen lake. The Crusaders started to retreat in disarray deeper onto the ice, and the appearance of the fresh Novgorod cavalry made them retreat in panic.

Historical legacy

The knights' defeat at the hands of Alexander's forces prevented the crusaders from retaking Pskov, the linchpin of their eastern crusade. The battle thus halted the eastward expansion of the Teutonic Order. Thereafter, the river Narva and Lake Peipus would represent a stable boundary dividing Eastern Orthodoxy from Western Catholicism.

Some historians have argued that the launch of the campaigns in the eastern Baltic at the same time were part of a coordinated campaign; Finnish historian Gustav A. Donner argued in 1929 that a joint campaign was organized by William of Modena and originated in the Roman Curia. This interpretation was taken up by Russian historians such as Igor Pavlovich Shaskol'skii and a number of Western European historians. More recent historians have rejected the idea of a coordinated attack between the Swedes, Danes and Germans, as well as a papal master plan due to a lack of decisive evidence. Some scholars have instead considered the Swedish attack on the Neva River to be part of the continuation of rivalry between the Rus' and Swedes for supremacy in Finland and Karelia. Anti Selart also mentions that the papal bulls from 1240 to 1243 do not mention warfare against "Russians", but against non-Christians.

In 1983, a revisionist view proposed by historian John L. I. Fennell argued that the battle was not as important, nor as large, as has often been portrayed. Fennell claimed that most of the Teutonic Knights were by that time engaged elsewhere in the Baltic, and that the apparently low number of knights' casualties according to their own sources indicates the smallness of the encounter. He also said that neither the '' Suzdalian Chronicle'' (the Lavrent'evskiy), nor any of the Swedish sources mention the occasion, which according to him would mean that the 'great battle' was little more than one of many periodic clashes. Donald Ostrowski (2006) pointed out that the ''Suzdalian Chronicle'' in the Laurentian Codex does bring it up in passing, but "provide only minimal information about the battle."

Cultural legacy

Tsarist Russia

Macarius of Moscow canonized Alexander Nevsky as a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547.

Soviet Russia

The event was glorified in Sergei Eisenstein's patriotic historical drama film ''Alexander Nevsky'', released in 1938. The movie, bearing propagandist allegories of the Teutonic Knights as Nazi Germans, with the Teutonic infantry wearing modified World War I German Stahlhelm helmets, has created a popular image of the battle often mistaken for the real events. In particular, the image of knights dying by breaking the ice and drowning originates from the film. The editors of the 1977 English translation of the ''Livonian Rhymed Chronicle'', Jerry Smith and William Urban, commented that 'Eisenstein's movie ''Alexander Nevsky'' is magnificent and worth seeing, but he tells us more about 1939 than 1242.'

Donald Ostrowski writes in his 2006 article ''Alexander Nevskii's "Battle on the Ice": The Creation of a Legend'' that accounts of ice breaking and knights drowning are a relatively recent embellishment to the original historical story. None of the primary sources mention ice breaking; the earliest account in the LRC explicitly says killed soldiers "fell on the grass" and the Laurentian continuation that it was "at a lake beyond Pleskov" (rather than "on a lake"). It was not until decades later that more details were gradually added of a specific lake, that the lake was frozen, that the crusaders were chased across the frozen lake, and not until the 15th century that a battle (not just a chase) took place on the ice itself. He cites a large number of scholars who have written about the battle, including Karamzin, Solovyev, Petrushevskii, Khitrov, Platonov, Grekov, Vernadsky, Razin, Myakotin, Pashuto, Fennell, and Kirpichnikov, none of whom mention the ice breaking up or anyone drowning when discussing the battle of Lake Peipus. After analysing all the sources, Ostrowski concludes that the part about ice breaking and drowning first appeared in the 1938 film ''Alexander Nevsky'' by Sergei Eisenstein. He added that Eisenstein's film was likely influenced by earlier accounts of the 1016 Battle of Liubech, which also took place on ice, but the ice neither weakened nor broke in the original story, only in two later interpolations.

In 1958 and 1959, underwater investigations in the northern part of Lake Lämmi (which connects Lake Peipus with Lake Pikhva), where some Soviet researchers presumed the combat happened, failed to find any artefacts connected to the battle of 1242. Given the fact that none of the primary sources mention that the ice broke and that many soldiers drowned, Ostrowski commented that such a lack of archaeological evidence at the lake's bottom was to be expected.

During World War II, the image of Alexander Nevsky became a national Soviet Russian symbol of the struggle against German occupation. The Order of Alexander Nevsky was established as a military award in the Soviet Union in 1942 during the Great Patriotic War.

Russian Federation

The Novgorodian victory is commemorated in the modern Russian Federation as one of the Days of Military Honour.

In 2010, the Russian government amended the statute of the Order of Alexander Nevsky as an award for excellent civilian service to the country.

Notes

Bibliography

Primary sources

* '' Life of Alexander Nevsky'' ( 1450).
* '' Livonian Rhymed Chronicle'' (LRC, 1290s).
** (Reprint: Hildesheim 1963). Lines 2235–2262.
**
* '' Pskov Third Chronicle'' (1567).
** Entries under the years 1240–1242. Translation based on the 2000 reprint of Nasonov's 1955 critical edition of the ''Pskov Chronicles''.
* "Rostov-Suzdal Compilation" in the '' Moscow Academic Chronicle'' (MAk, 1500).
* '' Suzdalian Chronicle'', '' Laurentian continuation'' (1377), s.a. 6750 (1242).
**
* Synod Scroll (Older Redaction) of the ''Novgorod First Chronicle'' ( 1275), s.a. 6750 (1242).
**

Literature

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* (public version of PhD dissertation).
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* (e-book)
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References

Further reading

* Military Heritage did a feature on the Battle of Lake Peipus and the holy Knights Templar and the monastic knighthood Hospitallers (Terry Gore, Military Heritage, August 2005, Volume 7, No. 1, pp. 28–33), .
* John France, ''Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades 1000–1300''. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
* Anti Selart. ''Livland und die Rus' im 13. Jahrhundert.'' Böhlau, Köln/Wien 2012, .
* Kaldalu, Meelis; Toots, Timo, ''Looking for the Border Island''. Tartu: Damtan Publishing, 2005. Contemporary journalistic narrative about an Estonian youth attempting to uncover the secret of the Ice Battle.

External links

JÄÄLAHING 1242 ⟩ Episood 1/4. Kes lasi tõde jälle sedapidi paista?
at ''Postimees'' (in Estonian)

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