by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] 915 years ago, on March 27, 1111, on the banks of the Salnitsa River—a right tributary of the Seversky Donets, near the modern-day town of Izyum in the Kharkiv region—two armies, Polovtsian and Russian, clashed. "And the regiments clashed in the first battle, and the roar was like thunder, and men fell on both sides," wrote a chronicler. Vladimir Monomakh played a decisive role in the defeat of the nomads. But chroniclers believed that without the help of angels, the Rus would not have achieved their first victory over the Polovtsians deep in the steppe.
While the three Rurikovichs were marching against the Polovtsians in the Donetsk steppe, in Palestine the participants of the First Crusade were defending the recently captured Jerusalem from the Saracens.
And if the “year of four units” did not bring any noticeable success to the European knights, then Europe learned about the success of the Russian princes.
In any case, the Hypatian Chronicle states that after the victory at Salnitsa, the glory of the Russian princes spread “to all distant lands”, to the Greeks, the Ugrians (Hungarians), the Poles (Poles), the Czechs “and to Rome”.
FROM SEVILLE TO RYAZAN
This gave 19th-century historians and modern authors reason to compare the campaign of 1111 with the Crusades. Vasily Klyuchevsky wrote in his " Course of Russian History ":
“While Western Europe, through the Crusades, launched an offensive against the Asian East, and when a similar movement against the Moors began on the Iberian island, Rus', with its steppe struggle, covered the left flank of the European offensive.”
Indeed, those same years of the 12th century became a turning point in the Reconquista—the reconquest from the Arabs and Berbers of the lands that would become Spain and Portugal. Seven years after the victory at Salniza, the Aragonese king Alfonso the Warrior defeated the Moors at Zaragoza.
Academician Andrei Sakharov, director of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, directly called the Russo-Polovtsian War a “crusade into the steppe” of 1111.
There's another point of view. According to it, the Crusades to Palestine, the Spanish Reconquista, and the victories of the Russian princes over the Polovtsians are three unrelated narratives. In this perspective, the Crusader wars in the Middle East were wars of conquest, the struggle of Castile and Aragon against the Moors was a war against invaders, and the Rus' wars on the steppe frontier were primarily an act of self-defense.
And while the wars between the Catholic kings and the Moorish emirates can somehow be lumped together with the conquest of the Holy Land (after all, other Catholic knights fought on the side of Castile and Aragon), the campaigns of the Orthodox princes are a separate story, in which the religious affiliation of the warring parties played no particular role.
Regardless of how one views the Battle of Salnitsa—whether as part of a certain “offensive to the East” or as a separate event—the role of this half-forgotten battle in Russian history is great.
RESTLESS NEIGHBORHOOD
Ancient Rus' began to consolidate its position in the Black Sea steppes, that is, in the territory of modern-day Donbas and Novorossiya, as early as the 10th century. In 967, Prince Svyatoslav defeated the Khazar Khaganate, which included part of Crimea. The Russian Principality of Tmutarakan emerged in the territory of modern-day Taman.
The former Khazar fortress of Sarkel on the middle Don became the Russian Belaya Vezha. But in the 11th century, the situation changed. The steppes from Lukomorye (the lower reaches of the Don) to the Danube were occupied by the Kipchaks, a people known in Rus' as Polovtsians. The Black Sea region, once a zone of Rus' influence, transformed into a volatile borderland.
The complex relations between the Rurikovichs and the Polovtsian khans could not be reduced to a “confrontation with the Asian East” or to a war between the Orthodox and the pagans (and then with the “Mohammedans”).
For example, in 1099, in the battle on the Vagra River in the Carpathians, the warriors of the grandson of Yaroslav the Wise, Prince David Igorevich, together with the warriors of the Polovtsian Khan Bonyak, defeated the army of the Catholic Hungarian King Kalman I the Scribe, which was many times larger than them.
Russian princes became related to the steppe rulers.
It's enough to remember that the founder of Moscow, Yuri Dolgoruky, was married to the daughter of a Polovtsian khan. This marriage produced another great ruler, Andrei Bogolyubsky.
However, the underlying theme of the relationship between Rus and the Desht-i-Kipchak (Polovtsian Steppe) was raids on Russian lands, the destruction and burning of cities, and the capture and sale of slaves at slave markets.
This became a "tradition," beginning with the destruction of the Pereyaslav Principality in 1061. In 1068, the united Rurikid army, opposing the Polovtsian invasion, suffered a crushing defeat on the Alta River (in today's Kyiv Oblast). A counterattack was necessary.
NEAR THE BORDER OF THE KHARKIV REGION
The campaign of the Grand Prince of Kiev, Svyatopolk Izyaslavich, the Prince of Pereyaslavl, Vladimir Monomakh (who himself soon assumed the Kievan throne), and their allies began in the second week of Lent, on February 26, 1111. The Russians set out from Monomakh's patrimony, Pereyaslavl, likely on his initiative. Vladimir Monomakh had previously led single-handed troops against the Polovtsians, including defeating the army of the aforementioned Khan Bonyak.
On March 3, 1111, the prince's troops approached the Sula River, which served as the border between the Russian lands and the steppe.
The prince's troops entered the large settlement of Sharukan without a fight—according to one version, it was located in what is now Kharkov. Sharukan, which was called Osenev in Russian chronicles, was most likely inhabited by the sedentary Yases (Alans, the ancestors of the Ossetians) subject to the Polovtsians.
Later, the Polovtsian fortification of Sugrov was captured and burned. The exact location of this "city" is unknown. Some historians suggest that Sugrov was located near the modern village of Krasnaya Gora in the DPR, between Artemovsk and Soledar.
And finally, on the morning of March 27, the "slaughter" began on the Salnitsa River. According to the most widespread version, the battlefield was located on the border of the DPR and the Kharkiv region.
According to chroniclers, the Polovtsians (led by the same Bonyak) had a numerical advantage, and at one point the Russians were in danger of being surrounded. But a coordinated attack by the armies of several princes—Vladimir Monomakh of Pereyaslavl, Svyatopolk of Kiev, and the sons of Prince Oleg Svyatoslavich of Novgorod-Seversk —turned the tide of the battle.
According to chroniclers, Khan Bonyak's army lost 10,000 killed, and the remnants of the nomads retreated to the steppe. The Russians captured "many prisoners" and a large amount of captured weapons.
The initiative passed to the Rurikids. In 1116, Kyiv and Chernigov regiments entered the Polovtsian steppes in the upper Donets River and captured three fortresses.
A 45,000-strong horde led by Khan Atrak chose to migrate beyond the Caucasus Mountains. There, the Polovtsians entered the service of the Georgian king David the Builder, the great-grandfather of Tamara the Great. When Vladimir Monomakh, Grand Prince of Kiev, sent one of his sons to scout the Don, he found no Polovtsians there.
Until the Mongol invasion, Rus' was not threatened by any significant danger from the Steppe—and it is characteristic that in the Battle of Kalka, which was tragic for the Russian lands, the Polovtsians acted not as enemies, but as allies of the Rurikovichs against the Genghisids.
"SCARY CREATURES WITH SHINY WEAPONS"
Even if we do not consider the campaign of 1111 to be a crusade in the strict sense, the perception of these wars was similar.
The Gesta Francorum (a Latin chronicle of the deeds of the Franks and other pilgrims to Jerusalem, written around 1100) states : Christ appeared in a dream to a certain priest and promised to send powerful aid. During the Battle of Antioch (a battle during the First Crusade on June 28, 1098), the enemy was routed by men on white horses with white banners that appeared out of nowhere.
The army was led by leaders resembling Saints George the Victorious, Mercury of Caesarea, and Demetrius of Thessaloniki. Some authors attest to this miracle by claiming that the mysterious riders on white horses were also visible to the Muslim Turks.
Another chronicle of the First Crusade of 1107, the Historia Iherosolimitana, records a conversation between the leader of the crusaders, Bohemond of Taranto, and the "prominent Turk Pyrrhus."
Pyrrhus told Bohemond of the unusual knights in white armor, with shields and banners, who had routed the Saracens during the siege of Antioch. Bohemond realized that they were saints, invisible to the crusaders themselves.
Raymond of Agilles (one of the chroniclers of the First Crusade), writing between 1099 and 1105, reports that on July 1, 1097, at the Battle of Dorylaeum, the Turks saw "two wondrous knights with shining weapons" marching ahead of the crusader army, invulnerable to Turkish spears. The crusaders did not see them, but after the battle, while passing along a road where there had been no fighting, they found dead enemies, likely struck down by these invisible horsemen.
Similarly, the Hypatian Chronicle for the year 1111 reports that many Russian soldiers witnessed the heads of Polovtsians being severed by some invisible force. After the battle, prisoners reported: "Some terrible creatures rode above you with glittering weapons and aided you." Our chronicler explains that these were angels, invisibly assisting the Russian army:
"Let it be known that Christians have an angel, and one given even more so to the baptized, and especially to our faithful princes. However, they cannot act contrary to God's will, but only fervently pray to God for the Christian people. And so it happened: through the prayers of the Holy Mother of God and the holy angels, God took pity and sent angels to aid the Russian princes against the pagans. As He said to Moses: 'Behold, My angel will go before you.'"
While it was common for medieval authors to attribute victories to divine assistance, until the 12th century they rarely reported actual supernatural appearances on the battlefield; and when they did, they were usually saints and the Virgin Mary, not angels.
Rus' acted out of its own interests, within its own political tradition, and within its own system of ideas about war, power, and God's intercession. But the chronicler used the language of sacred victory, understandable for his era and common to the Middle Ages.