Dmitry Donskoy prepares for war

Dmitry Ivanovich inherited Moscow in 1359 as a boy of about nine. Nothing about that moment promised the commanding warrior of later memory. Government depended on senior boyars and on Metropolitan Alexius, an experienced churchman and diplomat whose authority helped the young prince’s court hold together. Moscow itself had suffered from plague and fire, while its neighbours watched for weakness. The grand principality of Vladimir — the senior title in north-eastern Rus’ — did not pass automatically with Moscow. Dmitry of Suzdal briefly secured it from the Horde. The future Dmitry Donskoy therefore began not with a declaration of resistance but with a contest for recognition inside the existing system. His advisers negotiated, travelled and built alliances until the title was recovered. The political habits formed under Ivan Kalita were still operating: favour, tribute and dynastic manoeuvre came before battle.

The court’s room for manoeuvre was growing because the Golden Horde had entered a prolonged succession crisis. After the death of Khan Berdi Beg in 1359, claimants rose and fell with bewildering speed. Authority fragmented among competing courts and commanders. For princes in Rus’, this did not mean that ‘the Horde’ had disappeared. Different contenders could issue grants, demand payments or support rival Russian princes, and an army from the steppe remained a terrifying force. Instability multiplied the decisions Moscow had to make. Which claimant could confer a valid title? To whom was tribute owed? Would today’s ally survive until next year? A weaker centre could offer opportunity, but uncertainty also made bargains less durable. Dmitry’s government learned to operate in a world where obedience was no longer directed towards one reliably dominant khan.

Moscow did not immediately answer confusion with rebellion. Dmitry’s court continued to seek confirmations and to use competing Horde authorities against Russian rivals. Mamai at times backed Moscow’s claim to the grand principality; at other moments his interests pointed elsewhere. A grant from one Horde claimant might be challenged by another, leaving princes to decide whether the seal mattered more than the force available to uphold it. This unstable practice trained Moscow in selective obedience. The court could acknowledge the institution of Horde supremacy while disputing a particular demand, delay payment while negotiating, or accept recognition without accepting every political consequence. Such manoeuvres were risky, but they created a space between submission and open war. Direct resistance emerged from that space gradually, not from a sudden discovery that foreign rule was intolerable.

The most important strongman in the Horde’s western territories was Mamai. He was a powerful military commander and political broker, but not a Chinggisid — not a male-line descendant of Genghis Khan — and therefore could not rule as khan in his own right. He governed through khans he supported, drawing authority from them while making and unmaking their position. This limitation did not make him an impostor without resources. Mamai controlled territory, diplomacy and armies, and he could intervene decisively in the struggles of Rus’. Yet his authority was always entangled with rivalry elsewhere in the Horde. Moscow’s relationship with him shifted as both sides tested how much could be demanded. Later stories often turn that shifting relationship into a simple encounter between Russia and an external invader. In the 1360s and 1370s, it was a struggle within a political field that the princes of Moscow had long helped to sustain.

Dmitry first had to make his leadership credible among those princes. Moscow fought with Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod, then converted rivalry into a family alliance when Dmitry married Princess Evdokia of Suzdal in 1366. Ryazan remained wary and independent. Novgorod followed its own interests. Most dangerous was Tver, whose prince Mikhail sought the grand-princely title and found support from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania led campaigns against Moscow in 1368, 1370 and 1372. These conflicts were not a neat prelude in which all the lands of Rus’ gathered willingly behind one leader. They were contests over rank, territory and survival. Moscow prepared for confrontation with the Horde by first compelling, persuading or bargaining with neighbours whose cooperation could never be taken for granted.

The city’s new defences changed what its prince could risk. In 1367, Moscow replaced the Kremlin’s wooden fortifications with walls of white limestone. They did not trace the exact line or possess the appearance of the later red-brick Kremlin. Their importance lay in what they allowed this generation to do. When Lithuanian-led forces reached Moscow, the fortified centre resisted capture. The walls protected the prince’s court, treasury, churches and stores; they also gave allies confidence that Moscow would not vanish in the first successful raid. A capital built only for ceremony could be threatened into submission. A capital able to endure a siege could continue directing a coalition beyond its walls. White stone thus joined finance and faith as a material source of authority. It was architecture designed for a political climate in which yesterday’s negotiated order might become tomorrow’s war.

Military preparation extended beyond masonry. Dmitry needed a court capable of calling landholders to service, arranging contingents from allied princes and keeping command coherent when personal rank invited disagreement. Resources accumulated under earlier rulers could maintain horses, weapons, stores and communications, though the evidence does not permit a tidy budget or a modern picture of a standing national army. The forces available were still assembled through princely households, towns and networks of obligation. Their cohesion depended on politics. A rival who withheld troops could matter as much as a weak wall; an ally who changed sides could expose an entire campaign. Moscow’s military growth was therefore inseparable from its efforts to establish Dmitry’s seniority among the princes.

Moscow was no longer simply a town protected by wooden walls.

Moscow’s church connections also mattered, though they should not be romanticised into automatic religious unity. Metropolitan Alexius supported Dmitry’s government and carried out diplomacy across the divided lands. Monastic foundations, including the Trinity monastery associated with Sergius of Radonezh, belonged to a widening spiritual and social landscape around Moscow. Monasteries could clear and manage land, preserve memory, receive gifts and bind elite families to sacred institutions. Their moral prestige did not erase princely violence or settle every political dispute. The princes of Tver and Ryazan were Orthodox too. What Moscow possessed was an increasingly dense partnership between court and church, useful in presenting its claims as larger than one dynasty’s appetite. That language of common purpose would become more powerful as a direct collision with Mamai approached.

By the middle of the 1370s, Dmitry could demonstrate that wider authority in action. In 1375 he led a large coalition against Mikhail of Tver. The resulting settlement forced Mikhail to recognise Dmitry’s senior position and to align with him against enemies, while Tver itself survived as a principality. This was coercive politics, not spontaneous national union. Even so, it showed that Moscow could assemble forces from several lands and direct them towards a shared objective. That organisational capacity was essential. Fighting a Horde army required more than courage at the moment of contact: it required messages to distant princes, agreed command, provisions, routes and confidence that rivals would not attack while Moscow’s army was away. Decades of collecting tribute and cultivating service had produced administrative habits that could now be turned towards military mobilisation.

Relations with Mamai deteriorated in the same period. Tribute and the recognition of titles lay at the heart of the dispute, but the surviving accounts do not give a single clean moment at which Moscow announced independence. Dmitry could negotiate in one year and resist pressure in another. Mamai, facing rivals within the Horde, needed revenue and submission from Rus’ as signs of effective rule. Dmitry had reason to avoid financing a power that threatened his position, yet refusing or reducing payments invited punishment. Both men operated under constraints: Mamai had to prove that he could enforce authority, while Dmitry had to show allies that Moscow could protect the coalition it claimed to lead. The conflict sharpened by stages, through failed arrangements and escalating demonstrations of force.

Neither side represented a simple ethnic bloc. Mamai’s authority joined steppe politics to trading cities and diplomatic relationships beyond the Horde; Dmitry’s coalition brought together princes who had recently fought one another and might do so again. Both sought allies across political and religious frontiers when useful. This does not make their collision unreal. Tribute, precedence and the threat of punitive violence were concrete issues, and people in the path of armies paid for them. It does mean that a later national map fits the fourteenth century badly. The approaching war concerned who could command resources and obedience in a fractured regional order. Moscow increasingly gave that contest a language of collective defence, but its own supremacy within Rus’ was one of the things being constructed.

Preparation did not prevent disaster. In 1377, a force from the Russian principalities was surprised and defeated on the River Pyana by a Horde army led by Arab Shah. Chronicles attach moral lessons to the defeat, but their colourful details should not be mistaken for a complete military report. The strategic lesson was plain enough: divided command and careless security could destroy an army before it achieved anything.

Nizhny Novgorod’s lands then suffered attack. The episode is easy to omit when telling a smooth story of Moscow’s ascent, yet it reveals how fragile that ascent remained. The Horde’s internal conflicts had not made its mounted forces harmless, and one setback could expose cities and countryside to devastation. Dmitry’s next confrontation would be approached with the memory of failure close at hand.

In 1378 Mamai sent a force under the commander Begich against Dmitry. The Moscow prince gathered troops from his own domain and allied lands and moved to meet the advance at the River Vozha, in Ryazan territory. On 11 August the armies fought near a crossing. The sources are too limited and too literary to justify confident reconstructions of precise formations, manoeuvres or troop numbers. What can be said is consequential enough: Dmitry’s army held together, defeated Begich’s force and killed several Horde commanders. The victory was not won over Mamai in person, nor over the entire Golden Horde. It was a successful defence against a substantial punitive expedition sent in his interest — and the first major field victory of its kind for Moscow’s coalition over a Horde army.

Vozha changed expectation. The white-stone walls had shown that Moscow could survive behind fortifications; the campaign of 1375 had shown that Dmitry could lead other princes; now an army under his command had met forces associated with Mamai in open battle and won. That threshold was psychological as well as military. Tribute collection and negotiated titles had accustomed Moscow’s rulers to coordinating resources across several lands. Those same instruments could support an army that resisted the authority from which Moscow had once benefited. Cooperation had not been an embarrassing pause before the real history began. It had created the wealth, hierarchy and habits of command on which resistance depended.

The victory also made another confrontation more likely. Mamai could not easily accept a defeat that advertised limits to his authority, especially while rivals challenged him elsewhere in the Horde. Dmitry could not retreat without risking the standing he had built among allies and competitors. Yet no one in 1378 knew that the next great campaign would acquire a permanent place in historical memory. The coalition was vulnerable, loyalties remained conditional and the Horde’s wars were still unfolding. Dmitry’s position rested on preparation, not destiny: defensible stone, money, ecclesiastical support, hard-won precedence and experience of both defeat and victory.

This chapter ends at that charged moment, before the armies moved towards the Don in 1380. Kulikovo belongs to the next stage and should not be allowed to swallow everything that made it possible. Vozha was the immediate military threshold, proof that direct resistance could succeed in the field. It was not independence, and even the greater battle to come would not finally end Horde power or tribute. Moscow had learned to fight because earlier Moscow had learned to cooperate, accumulate and organise. Under Dmitry, those inherited tools were redirected towards a dangerous claim: that the prince who had once sought authority through the Horde might now withstand one of its most powerful commanders.