On 5 April 1242 an army from Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal under Prince Alexander Yaroslavich, later called Nevsky, defeated the knights of the Livonian Order and the men of the Bishop of Dorpat near Lake Peipus, on today's border between Estonia and Russia. It is one of the most famous battles in Russian history, yet almost everything about it is uncertain except the result. The best known image, of armored knights sinking through breaking ice, appears in none of the early sources.
A war on the eastern frontier
In 1240 Alexander Yaroslavich had beaten the Swedes on the Neva, but soon afterwards he quarreled with Novgorod and left the city. When the crusading knights invaded Rus' lands, Novgorod invited him back. The knights were the Livonian Order, by then an autonomous branch of the Teutonic Order, together with the men of the Bishop of Dorpat, today Tartu. After a series of clashes, the decisive battle came in April 1242.1
The date of 5 April comes from the Novgorod First Chronicle, which adds that the battle was fought on a Saturday. It is a date in the Julian calendar, which the chronicles used. Britannica places the fight on the narrow channel between Lake Peipus, known in Russian as Lake Chud, and Lake Pskov.2
What the sources say
The oldest account comes from the enemy side. As Donald Ostrowski shows, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, written in the 1290s, says the knights' force was too small, that the Rus' had many archers and so many men that there were sixty for every German knight, and that many from both sides fell dead on the grass. In its count, twenty Brothers of the Order were killed and six captured, while some of the Dorpat men escaped.3
The Novgorod First Chronicle, in the passages Ostrowski quotes, tells it differently. The Germans and Estonians fled, and the Novgorodians pursued them for seven versts across the ice to the Subol shore. It counts 400 Germans killed and 50 captured, and countless Estonians, and a later redaction raised the figure to 500. Some historians, including David Nicolle, argue that the Livonian count covered only full members of the Order and the Novgorod one all the German troops, while Ostrowski treats the two accounts as largely irreconcilable.4
How large were the armies?
Nobody knows. Ostrowski lists modern estimates ranging from 700 to 15,000 on the crusader side and from 1,700 to 17,000 for the Novgorodians. Nicolle's more cautious reconstruction has about 2,600 crusaders, including 1,000 Estonian infantry, against about 5,000 men under Alexander, though Nicolle himself called the Novgorodian figure inspired guesswork. In Ostrowski's words, it is anyone's guess how many troops took part.5
The ice that never broke
None of the early sources says that the ice broke or that knights drowned. Ostrowski traces the drownings into the story only to the second half of the fifteenth century, and the claim that the battle itself was fought on the frozen lake, with the ice covered in blood, to the later Life of Alexander Nevsky. The modern picture was fixed by Sergei Eisenstein's film <em>Alexander Nevsky</em>, with Prokofiev's music, in which the fleeing knights vanish beneath cracking ice.6
What remains is a real victory. Britannica credits Alexander with halting the eastward expansion of the Swedes and the Germans. The battle, the sources and the legend are covered in more detail in our article on the Battle of Lake Peipus.7
Also on this day
- 1818: Battle of Maipú. Near Santiago, the patriot army of José de San Martín fought the Spanish royalist forces of Mariano Osorio in the Chilean War of Independence.
