Siege of Kiev (1240)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Siege of Kiev began on the 28th of November 1240 and lasted exactly nine days. When it ended on the 6th of December, a city that had held perhaps 50,000 people was reduced to silence. Around 2,000 survived. Most of the city burned. Out of forty major buildings, only six remained standing. What drove the Mongols to this point? Who held the city when the catapults rolled into position? And how do we know any of this, given that the sources contradict each other and historians spent centuries arguing over even the dates? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Road to the Gates

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  Batu Khan's campaign against the Rus' principalities had been building since late 1237, when his forces conquered Ryazan in the northeast. By 1238, the Mongols had moved southwest to destroy Vladimir and Kozelsk. In 1239, they took both Pereyaslav and Chernigov, and from Chernigov, Kiev was the obvious next target.

  The political situation inside Kiev was tangled. Grand Prince Michael of Chernigov had received Mongol envoys demanding the city's submission and had them executed, a move that sealed his fate when Chernigov fell. Michael then fled to Hungary in 1239 or 1240. With the seat of power suddenly vacant, a prince from Smolensk named Rostislav II Mstislavich moved quickly to claim Kiev for himself. But he was in turn driven out by Daniel of Galicia-Volhynia, known also as Danylo Romanovych, who added Kiev to his principality.

  Danylo did not stay. When the Mongol army arrived in November 1240, Danylo was in Hungary, trying to negotiate a military alliance against the invasion. The man left to organize Kiev's defense was a military commander called Voivode Dmytro. It was under Dmytro's watch that Batu Khan's forces, directed tactically by the great Mongol general Subutai, closed in on the city.

• 3. Möngke at the Walls

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  Batu's cousin Möngke led the vanguard army that first came within sight of Kiev. According to the sources, Möngke was struck by the city and offered terms for surrender. His envoys were killed, as Michael of Chernigov's had been before.

  Batu Khan dealt with one obstacle before the main assault. The Chorni Klobuky, Rus' vassal fighters who were moving to relieve the city, were intercepted and destroyed. With that relief force gone, the full Mongol army gathered outside the city gates, joining up with Möngke's troops.

  On the 28th of November, the Mongols positioned catapults near one of Kiev's three gates. The spot was chosen carefully: tree cover reached almost to the city walls there, which may have allowed the Mongols to move equipment forward with less exposure. The bombardment that followed lasted several days, pounding the walls while the defenders held on. It was during this phase that the Kievans captured a Mongol soldier named Tovrul', who, according to the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, then gave the defenders the names of all the Mongol officers commanding the besieging force.

• 4. Six December

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  On the 6th of December 1240, Kiev's walls were breached. Hand-to-hand fighting spread through the streets, and the Kievans suffered serious losses. Voivode Dmytro was struck by an arrow and wounded during the fighting.

  As night fell, the Mongols held the positions they had taken while the surviving Kievans pulled back toward the center of the city. A large number of people crowded into the Church of the Tithes, seeking shelter in one of the city's most prominent religious buildings. The next morning, when the Mongols pressed their final assault, the balcony of the church collapsed under the weight of the people standing on it. Many were crushed.

  After the battle, the Mongols plundered Kiev and killed most of the population. Of roughly 50,000 inhabitants before the invasion, about 2,000 survived. Only six of the city's forty major buildings were left standing. Despite this destruction, Voivode Dmytro was spared. The Mongols, recognizing his bravery in the defense, showed him mercy.

• 5. Westward Into Europe

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  Kiev's fall opened the road west. Batu Khan forced both Galicia and Volhynia to submit to his authority, and the Mongol army then pushed into Hungary and Poland.

  The advance into Central Europe did not end in conquest. In September 1242, Batu Khan received word that Ogedei Khan had died. He needed to attend the quriltai, the assembly where a successor to the Great Khan would be chosen, and the westward drive stopped. Back in Kiev, the Mongols quickly set up administrative structures. Fra Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, an Italian diplomat who visited the region in the 1240s, already observed the new Mongol regime collecting tributes through a Darughachi in Kiev and elsewhere.

  The Rus' princes, one by one, made the journey to Sarai, the capital of Batu Khan's newly established Golden Horde, to submit formally and be confirmed in their territories. Michael of Chernigov, who had spent his exile fruitlessly seeking help in Hungary, Poland, and Galicia, returned to Chernigov by 1243 after accepting that the Mongols had recognized Yaroslav II of Vladimir as the new grand prince. Daniel of Galicia and Michael of Chernigov were the last two major princes to make their submission to Batu Khan. Michael, however, refused to perform the required ritual, which included walking between two fires and bowing before an idol of Chinggis Khan. This refusal reportedly angered Batu, and Michael was executed in September 1246.

• 6. A Chronicle of Contradictions

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  Reconstructing what happened at Kiev in 1240 is complicated by the fact that the surviving records argue with each other. Scholar Alexander Maiorov, writing in 2016, compared all the dates in the available accounts and concluded that the siege lasted nine days, from the 28th of November to the 6th of December. That nine-day figure is now the scholarly consensus, but reaching it required working through chronicles that give conflicting dates and contradict each other on basic facts.

  The most detailed native account is the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, preserved in the Hypatian Codex and other manuscripts and completed in the 1290s. It provides the fullest description of the siege and is the source for details like the capture of Tovrul'. Alongside it sit the Novgorod First Chronicle, the Laurentian Codex, the Academic Chronicle, the Chronicler from Vladimir, and several others including the Pskov Chronicles. The Pskov account, written roughly two centuries after the events, claimed that Mongol siege engines took ten weeks to breach Kiev's two sets of fortifications. Maiorov judged this version entirely fictitious, assembled when the Golden Horde had already declined and writers were reconstructing the drama from scratch.

  Foreign records add further complexity. The Jami al-tawarikh, written in Arabic and Persian by Rashid al-Din Hamadani just after 1300, refers to the city by its old Turkic name, Manker Kan. A letter by a Hungarian bishop, written between 1239 and 1242, offers indirect evidence for the timing of the invasion and suggests the Mongols may have waited until mid-November for the Dnieper River to freeze before crossing with their heavy equipment, moving yurts, and siege weapons.

  Giovanni da Pian del Carpine visited Kiev in 1246 and left a short passage about the siege in his Ystoria Mongalorum. His text survives in two versions that differ in important ways. The first redaction says the Mongols put all the inhabitants to death. The second, whose authenticity is disputed, adds that when Carpini passed through, the remaining inhabitants were kept in complete servitude, suggesting some survived. These two statements cannot both be true. Scholars have also raised questions about whether Carpine was even describing Kiev or a different town he was told was Kiev, since he mentions no identifiable landmarks, not even Saint Sophia Cathedral.