BATTLE OF UGRA RIVER

On October 8, 1480, the Great standing on the Ugra river, a standoff between the forces of Akhmat Khan, Khan of the Great Horde, and Ivan III Grand Prince of all Rus. The Tataro-Mongols retreat lead to the disintegration of the Great Horde. An excerpt from the article:

"For several months both sides temporized, and only in October did fighting break out. Muscovite troops, led by Ivan’s III son Ivan and brother Andrew, repulsed several Tatar attempts to cross the Ugra. Clashes alternated with negotiations which, however, met with no success. Finally, on November 11, 1480, the khan withdrew, thus acknowledging the failure of his attempt to restore his lordship over Rus.

In Russian historical tradition this event is celebrated as the end of the Mongol yoke. The roots of this tradition date back to the 1560s, when anonymous author of the so-called Kazan History wrote of the dissolution of the Horde after the death of Ahmad (1481) and hailed the liberation of the Russian lands from the Moslem yoke and slavery. In modern historiography, Nikolai Karamzin was the first to link the liberation with the events of 1480. Later, Soviet publications echoed this view. Another judgment of the same events was pronounced by the famous nineteenth-century Russian historian, Sergei Soloviev, who ascribed the downfall of the yoke not to the heroic deeds of Ivan III but to the growing weakness of the Horde itself. The same argument was put forward by George Vernadsky (1959), who maintained that Rus freed itself from dependence on the Horde not in 1480 but much earlier, in the 1450s. In Anton Anatolevich Gorskii’s view, the liberation should be dated not to 1480 but to 1472, when Ivan III stopped paying tribute to the khan."