Draft:Capture of Kiev (1416)

Capture of Kiev (1416) — the capture and devastation of Kiev by the troops of the Golden Horde emir Edigu. One of the episodes of the long Horde-Lithuanian confrontation, which took place from 1390s to 1410s and was connected with Vitovt's attempts to interfere in the intra-Horde struggle for power and his support of Tokhtamysh's descendants, with whom Edigu was feuding. Most likely, Kiev served Tokhtamysh's descendants as an operational base. It was in Kiev that Vitovt appointed his Horde protégés.

Edigu's army struck from the south. Having captured Zvenigorod-Kievsky, it approached Kiev in June, attacked the city and almost completely burnt it down. Podol and the Upper Town were captured and destroyed, the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery was ruined. The only part of Kiev that the Tatars could not take was the Kiev Castle, located on Zamkova Hora. Among the defenders of the city were Poles, to whose help the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had to resort. Гулевич В .П. Татары в кругу высокой европейской политики на церковном соборе в Констанце [in:] Studia historica Europae Orientalis – Исследования по истории Восточной Европы. Научный сборник. Вып. 10. Минск РИВШ, 2017. — С. 65.

Archival documents mention that along with Kiev a large number of neighbouring villages suffered.

The inhabitants of Kiev were captured as yasir. The destruction of the city was so great that the Gustyn Chronicle noted: "Kiev has lost its beauty, and even now it cannot be like that".

The Horde destroyed the Kiev rotunda; the St Sophia Cathedral probably suffered as well.

Just as after the siege in 1299, when Metropolitan Maxim of Kiev moved to Vladimir, the new Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia Gregory Tsamblak, appointed by Vitovt, moved to Vilna after the defeat of Kiev by Edigu. Siege of Kiev in 1416 was the greatest since the pogrom of 1240.

On the next year, Edigu made a devastating raid on Podolia.

Literature

 * Ивакин Г. Ю. Історичний розвиток Києва XIII — середина XVI ст. — К., 1996.
 * ПСРЛ (Густынская летопись). — СПб., 1843. — Т. 2.