Battle of The Ice - The Battle

The Battle

In the spring of 1242, the Teutonic Knights defeated a detachment of Novgorodians about 20 km south of the fortress of Dorpat (Tartu). Led by Prince-Bishop Hermann of Dorpat, the knights and their auxiliary troops of local Ugaunian Estonians then met with Alexander's forces by the narrow strait that connects the northern and southern parts of Lake Peipus (Lake Peipus proper with Lake Pskovskoe) on April 5, 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.

The crusader forces likely numbered around 4,000. Most of them were probably Estonians (Chudes). The Russians fielded around 5,000 men: Alexander and his brother Andrei's bodyguards (druzhina), totalling around 1,000, plus the militia of Novgorod.

According to contemporary Russian chronicles, after hours of hand-to-hand fighting, Alexander ordered the left and right wings of his archers to enter the battle. The knights 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 Russian cavalry made them run for their lives. When the knights attempted to rally at the far side of the lake, the thin ice began to give way under the weight of their heavy armour, and many knights drowned.

In 1983, a revisionist view proposed by historian John I. L. Fennell argues that the battle was not as important, nor as large, as has sometimes been portrayed. Fennell claimed that most of the Teutonic Knights were by that time engaged elsewhere in the Baltic. He also states that the apparently low casualties suffered by the knights according to their own sources is indicative of the small magnitude of the encounter.

Russian historian Alexander Uzhankov, who cited a number of authors and primary sources, suggested that Fennell distorted the picture by ignoring many historical facts and documents. In order to stress the importance of the battle, he cites two papal bulls of Gregory IX, promulgated in 1233 and 1237, which called for a crusade to protect Christianity in Finland against her neighbours. The first bull explicitly mentions Russia. The kingdoms of Sweden, Denmark and the Teutonic Order built up an alliance in June 1238, under the auspices of Danish king Valdemar II. They assembled the larger western cavalry force of their time. Another point mentioned by Uzhakov is the 1243 treaty between Novgorod and the Teutonic Order, where the knights abandoned all claims to Russian lands. Uzhakov also emphasizes, with respect to the scale of battle, that for each knight deployed on the field there were eight to 30 combatants, counting squires, archers and servants.