The first fifty to seventy years after the devastating Tartar- Mongol invasions of southwest Rus’ is an understudied page in our nation’s history.
What was Kyiv like after 1240? Serious research began as late as in the early nineteenth century. Archeological excavations went hand in hand with the study of old manuscripts, maps, and records made by foreigners who visited Kyiv at various times. However, the absence of necessary information led to contradictory conclusions. Most researchers were inclined to believe that the Upper Kyiv, the seat of grand princes of Kyiv, had been in certain dereliction from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Their conclusions were largely based on the written testimonies of sixteenth and seventeenth century foreign travelers, which coincide in general outlines.
For example, in the early sixteenth century the Austrian Count Herberstein wrote under the impression of what he had seen, “The magnificence and true royal majesty of this city is only emphasized by the ruins and half- destroyed monuments. You can still see the vestiges of devastated churches and monasteries on the nearby hills...” Imperial envoy Erich Lasota in 1596 shared the count’s impressions, “Where there was once a city there are now ruins, almost no or very few buildings. The present-day city was built below...”
No notable changes were observed in next century, in the 1630s-40s French engineer Guillaume de Beauplan wrote, “Only two churches, St. Sophia’s and St. Michael’s, have come down to us as a memory of past days. What was left of the others are only ruins, the most interesting of which being the five to six feet tall half-destroyed walls of St. Basil’s Church with Greek inscriptions.”
Only five old churches are marked on Pechersk monastery monk Opanas Kalnofoisky’s plan of the Upper Town (1638), the rest “lying like big graves, as if buried for ages.” These descriptions of ancient Kyiv ruins were complemented with the pictures of what remained of the majestic Upper Town, somewhat resembling Ancient Roman ruins, executed in 1651 by a Dutch painter Abraham van Westerveld. Obviously, his works are not distinguished by photographic precision: perhaps to impart the ruins a more romantic look, the artist changed some details in the genre scenes, but in general the drawings convey quite accurately the characteristic stylistic features of Old Rus’ stone temples as confirmed by recent research.
No doubt, Kyiv never suffered such ruin throughout its centuries of history, although chroniclers testify that 1169 and 1203, years of domestic wars, also saw temples, boyar palaces, and common people’s huts burning, church property sacked, with the city dwellers carried away into captivity. But the consequences of the 1240 Tartar pogrom were disastrous both for Kyiv and for the Kyiv region mainly because it undermined the people’s capacity to quickly revive their land, for the lion’s share of work done by a considerably reduced population much was appropriated by the Golden Horde instead of restoring the ruined towns. But it would be also wrong to date the ruins depicted on Westerveld’s drawings or described by contemporaries in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries only to 1240, for Kyiv also suffered devastating Tartar pogroms in 1416 and 1482.
While Kyiv rulers, particularly Princes Olelko and his son, Semen, rebuilt the city quite fast after 1416, the ancient capital sank into a protracted crisis in the late fifteenth century due to incessant Tartar forays on the Kyiv land, as well as to the encroachments of Poland on Ukraine, all of which constituted an obstacle to overcoming the last pogrom’s consequences. As was the case after 1240, the damaged stone structures further decayed under the pressure of time and climate. The ruins the foreigners saw could have been caused, to a large extent, by this onslaught.
Advocates of a different look at Batu Khan’s attack in contrast to the previous one and perhaps also with a grain of truth, claimed that the all too emotional chroniclers, when describing the fall of Kyiv and other Rus’ cities, greatly exaggerated the damage inflicted on the capital. As to concrete cases of ruin, they say the old documents only mention destruction of the Tithe Church. Such claims by some nineteenth and twentieth century historians were corroborated with the views expounded by Russian historian Lev Gumiliov in Old Rus’ and the Great Steppe and other books. These fundamental works unfold to the reader the wide panorama of a multifaceted nomadic steppe life, with epochs and peoples changing one another and difficult and contradictory relations between Old Rus’ and the steppe.
In 1243 Batu Khan came back after a more or less successful expeditions to Central and Eastern Europe and founded Sarai (palace in Turkic), the Golden Horde’s new capital, near what is now Astrakhan. By the 1260s, under Batu’s successors Berke and Mengu-Timur Khans (Batu Khan died in 1255), the Golden Horde finally shook off the burdensome supremacy of the Karakorum khan whose seat was too far away in Mongolia. Before that, the Horde rulers used to give a considerable part of tribute to the Great Khan.
Interestingly, the Tartar- Mongols conducted the first census of the Southern Rus’ population (Ukraine and Ukrainian are rather arbitrary terms in the context of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, as the population of Ukrainian lands were at that time aware of themselves as Ruthenians) as early as 1246. This census was recorded by a synodic of St. Anthony’s monastery in Lubek. As evidenced by the Franciscan monk Plano Carpini, the Tartar-Mongols demanded that the conquered peoples “give them a tenth of everything, both humans and property.” Sources confirm that tribute collection was accompanied by a massive eastward deportation of the Ruthenian people.
Unfortunately, this bitter cup did not bypass the local princes. Many of them found death in the Sarai which they visited to cajole the khan into giving them a yarlyk (permission) for princedom. For instance, Mykhailo of Chernihiv, the son of Vsevolod, arrived at Batu Khan’s headquarters in 1245. The khan, undoubtedly aiming to seize the Chernihiv prince’s lands, decided to subject Mykhailo and his companion boyar Fedir to “a test of faith.” The refusal of Mykhailo and Fedir to betray their principles (“We are bowing to and extolling you, but not your laws and those of your fathers”) resulted in Batu Khan ordering to subject the prince and the boyar to severe tortures. Mykhailo was canonized by the Orthodox church as a martyr for his faith.
As Mykhailo Hrushevsky writes, “The boyars, top clergy, and all the wealthy, who got used to living under the special patronage and protection of princes and their retinues, felt very uneasy under Tartar power when the system of princes and the retinues declined. The latter moved over (from the Dnipro region — Authors) to where the princely system still survived. i.e., to the northern and western Ukrainian lands... But the common people never rose in their interests above everyday problems: there was nobody to order books, icons, and cassocks...”
When Batu Khan was still in power, he established in Southern Rus’ the administrative fiscal system of baskaky (tax-collectors). The baskaky’s units collected tribute and in fact maintained political surveillance over the territories subjected by the Tartars and Mongols. In addition, the baskaky system also provided for the construction of reinforced settlements, a kind of Tartar-Mongol military centers, the bulwarks of nomadic power in Southern Rus’. One such outpost was what is now the village of Batyyivo, Kyiv oblast.
Batu Khan also formed the ulus -based structure of his state (ulus means district). For example, the Dnipro region was divided between Kuremsa and Mautsi, warlords who saw service in Batu’s expeditions. The Franciscan monk Plano Carpini thus describes the tragic picture of the decline of Kyiv, former capital of old Rus’: “The city has now been brought almost to nothing with 200 houses at most still standing.”
Archeological excavations in Kyiv show a terrifying picture of the 1240 Tartar-Mongol pogrom. For instance, about two thousand Kyivans were found in one mass grave alone as late as the twentieth century. This disaster drastically slowed the historical process in the region.
Even Academician Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who defended the viewpoint of his teacher Volodymyr Antonovych that the complete devastation of the Dnipro region after Batu Khan’s invasion was a myth, noted that the Dnipro region, which “was the hearth of political, economic, and cultural life of the whole Eastern Europe in the first centuries of Ukrainian lands’ historical life..., became a deep ravine in which virgin nature precipitously died out, without feeling the heavy hand of man...”
Indisputably, some elements of hyperbole do occur in the Kyiv Rus’ and later chronicles dedicated to military actions. Some exaggeration of the Tartar-Mongol invasion’s consequences is quite easy to understand, for it is impossible for a sane person to watch dispassionately the downfall of a state system that had stood for ages. On the other hand, it is easy to explain why chronicles mention only the destruction of the Tithe Church: describing the events in Kyiv, the chroniclers of other lands could not know the exact scope of the damage inflicted, so they confined themselves to the most tragic detail in the downfall of Kyiv, the death of the capital’s last defenders under the church’s debris.
Of course, the horde warriors did not intend to spend time and effort to destroy about fifty stone structures in Kyiv. Rather, they were guided by a more pragmatic motive, to sack the city and enslave its dwellers. Yet, the fires that engulfed Kyiv during the assault set ablaze not only wooden buildings but also stone churches: the unbearable heat made their walls, vaults, and domes crack and split. The surviving population had neither means nor opportunities to renovate most of the damaged churches. Temperature changes, precipitation, the sun, and wind all conspired to finish what the Mongols started had begun.
After capturing and looting the capital of Rus’, the wave of nomadic hordes rolled further west, leaving behind a completely burnt Hill (Upper Town, seat of the grand princes) and a perhaps less-ruined Podil (the Lower Town) whose population, as some historians suppose, had abandoned their homes well before the assault began. The old town lay in ruins, but its lucrative geographic position still remained unchanged. Podil was the first to begin to rise from the ashes largely owing to being the main trade and craft area. As early as in 1245 Carpini saw in Kyiv merchants from various countries of Western Europe and Constantinople. For several centuries on, the Poldil would maintain the status the center of Kyiv’s public life, and the impregnable castle built on a Podil hill would endure the assault of Edygei Khan in 1416.
However, indomitable earthen ramparts with partially undamaged town walls still towered around the cities of Volodymyr, Yaroslav, and Iziaslav-Sviatopolk, thus providing a certain level of protection. The remaining population of the Hill and the burnt suburbs could not but take advantage of this, which was corroborated by the excavated remnants of the Upper Town’s fourteenth and fifteenth century houses.
But the most convincing argument that life continued on the hill is the fact that the city of Yaroslav long remained the seat of Rus’ metropolitans. The Saint Sophia’s Metropolitan See, a still-unsurpassed masterpiece of Rus’ architecture and the symbol of mighty Kyivan Rus, repeatedly occurs on the pages of historical documents of those times. Even neglected in the sixteenth century, the cathedral struck the imagination of contemporaries. Erich Lasota wrote in 1596, “Especially glorious, beautiful and magnificent is St. Sophia’s cathedral, unrivaled in size.” Kyiv’s St. Sophia’s cathedral was the place where church hierarchs were ordained to serve in all the Rus’ lands, and in 1273 Kyiv hosted an assembly of Rus’ bishops. It is unlikely that all these functions were held among the impassable ruins.
Another symbol of ancient Kyiv, the Golden Gate, also stands out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, a Lviv-based merchant Martin Gruneweg noted in 1584 that the heavily-ruined gate was still crowned with “a chapel according to a Ruthenian custom to adorn their gates with beautiful little churches.” Westerveld’s drawings also confirm existence of the remnants of the walls and vaults of a church above the gate more than four centuries after the Tartars. Even in the mid-seventeenth century the gate still played the role of a parade entrance to Kyiv: it is through this gate that Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky solemnly entered the city in 1648, receiving a rapturous welcome from the Kyivans.
St. Michael’s Golden Domed Cathedral, built in 1108, survived almost until our times. In the late fourteenth century it housed a monastery whose father superior was mentioned in the Pechersk- Monastery-issued credentials dated November 21, 1398. In 1482 the temple was considerably ruined during the seizure of Kyiv by Mengli-Girei, and the monastery resumed functioning only in 1523.
The second half of the thirteenth century sees Kyiv go into a decline, gradually losing its so- called supremacy even in purely formal terms. At the turn of the fourteenth century, the metropolitans choose Vladimir on Kliazma the as their seat. It should be noted that the top clergy moved to Vladimir for entirely pragmatic reasons. For instance, a patriarchal council resolution points out “an extremely difficult situation” in Kyiv and that there are “steady and reliable sources of profits” in Vladimir.
Yet, there was another, quite important, reason: internecine fighting broke out in 1260-1290 in Southern Rus’ between Toqta and Nogai for the Sarai throne. In 1297-1298 the Nogai routed Toqta, the then Golden Horde ruler. But the latter managed to muster new forces and took complete revenge in September 1299. Nogai was killed in this battle. Probably the metropolitan chair was moved over in response to the plundering of Dnipro lands. By initiating this move, Metropolitan Maksym in fact triggered processes which dealt a heavy blow on the unity of the Orhodox Church and a half centuries later, this resulted in the formation of two independent metropolitan seats on the territory of former Old Rus’.
But even losing its importance, Kyiv remained a dominant point in political awareness, a center to which all Rus’ people gravitated. What remained invincible was the spirit of a people which, in spite of the terrible burden of the horde yoke, preserved the potential for the consequent revival of its land, this time in the shape of a Cossack state with an equally glorious and tragic history. Kyiv thus remained for many ages to come as “a symbol of historical and all-Rus’ unity.”
