600 years ago, 50 kilometers from Dimitrovgrad, the largest medieval battle in the territory of modern Russia took place.
At the end of the XIV century, the Khan of the Golden Horde Tokhtamysh and Emir of Samarkand Timur, whom the enemies nicknamed Tamerlan, i.e. Lame, fought in our area.
What is interesting, Timur himself made the Chingizid Tokhtamysh Khan of the Golden Horde, when he finished the «Great Jam», putting his young protégé at the head of the horde. But Tokhtamysh turned out to be a lucky and perky puppet: first he was unwittingly helped by Prince Dmitry of Moscow, who defeated the rival Khan Mamai, then he burned Moscow and returned its territory under the Golden Horde.
Then the Khan realized that Timur helped him for a reason: the emir was interested in controlling the northern branch of the Great Silk Road, which bypassed Central Asia ruined by his military initiatives. But without such a financial resource the Golden Horde would quickly perish in poverty, so Tokhtamysh decided that he had no choice and attacked his puppeteer first.
On the right is the Emir of Samarkand Tamerlane, on the left is the Great Khan of the Golden Horde Tokhtamysh
He did everything very competently: he made a secret alliance with almost all the neighbors of Timur’s empire, in the past from it necessarily suffered, they all together suddenly struck Samarkand and Bukhara, when Timur was on a campaign … Tokhtamysh did not take into account only one thing: he challenged a man, disproportionate to him scale of personality. Timur returned to sacked Samarkand and within a few years methodically, one by one, destroyed all of Tokhtamysh’s allies. Destroyed in the literal sense — cut and burned their main cities.
In 1391 Timur gathered a huge army and went with it to the north, to the Golden Horde. On the way he put a memorial stone on which he claimed that he was leading 200 thousand people. Tokhtamysh did not accept the battle and began to retreat along the Volga, gathering reserves and depriving the Emir’s troops of resources. Tom soon got tired of such a chase, and he ordered his vanguard to catch up with Tohtamysh’s troops and tie them up in battle before the approach of the main forces. The warriors almost all died, but they carried out the order.
Tamerlane’s warriors on the right, Tokhtamysh’s on the left.
On June 18 on the river Kondurcha, according to some sources in the area of the village of Koshki (present-day Samara region, about 50 kilometers from Dimitrovgrad), that the name comes from the Turkic «kosh», a battle camp, two huge troops lined up opposite each other. The army of Tokhtamysh, according to contemporaries, on both flanks outnumbered the enemy.
Timur ordered his dinner to be served. Hundreds of thousands of men, one step away from death, stood waiting for the Emir of Samarkand to eat. He was in no hurry.
Tokhtamysh never dared to attack first, his soldiers, realizing that they were humiliated, lost morale even before the battle began. The battle lasted 1-3 days, sources report differently, all this time mounted archers of the horde rushed into attacks on Timur’s infantry covered with large shields. Then the emir’s bribed standard-bearer lowered the main khan’s flag, which was a signal «General retreat!». Confusion began in Tokhtamysh’s troops, then panic and they ran. Timur’s cavalry chased the Horde all the way to the Volga, cutting down by the thousands.
The battlefield
However, traces of the battles directly — a carpet of small iron, which after the battle was not collected, or mass graves of the dead, which must be huge — have not been found by anyone. However, no one was seriously looking for them, in the Russian historiography attention to the battle on the river Kondurcha is almost not paid to the battle, because in it there were no «ours», those for whom it is necessary to cheer and agitate, and Tamerlan and Tokhtamysh — the enemies of Russia. Though their battle has defined the future of our country much more strongly, than battle on Kulikovo field. Golden horde from blow of Timur so and has not recovered.
Since the event was of epic proportions, these battlegrounds can be tens of kilometers from the emir’s bet. The area is located at the junction of three regions, Tatarstan, the Samara region and ours, the archaeological Klondike could theoretically be in any of them.
Historian Felix Kasimov tried to orient the battle on the ground: «It is very likely that the Kondurchi events of the summer of 1391 developed as follows. The battle began on the morning of June 18 in the area of the present-day Teply Stan and ended on June 20 with the complete defeat of Tokhtamysh. The defeated detachments fled towards the Volga, along the right bank of the Kondurcha and Soka. The cruel massacre ended near the mouth of the Soka, where the remnants of the Mongol troops were pressed against the Volga and destroyed. It happened closer to the evening of June 21. The other part of Tamerlane’s troops, which remained at the battle site, slowly followed with all the cargo and wounded, collecting numerous trophies. After a couple of days, the victorious army united and camped on the bank of the Volga, in the vicinity of Tsarev Kurgan. The grandiose feast lasted almost until the end of July».
Traces of that battle were found even in the very center of Ulyanovsk. In 1996, laying a trench near the House of Soviets, the workers found an ancient burial site, in which lay about a dozen skeletons. When Ulyanovsk archeologist Irshat Zamaletdinov descended into the dug trench, he found more than a dozen skulls with obvious signs of violent death: one skull had an arrowhead stuck in it, two were cut behind the left ear and one was pierced in the back of the head. The dating suggests those times. Most likely, this is a hasty burial by fleeing Horde fighters of their comrades who died on the road from wounds.
When the khan’s flag fell and Tokhtamysh’s army ran, and after it ran and the khan himself, one of his soldiers remained and continued to fight. One against the whole army of Timur. He was taken alive and brought to the Emir. He asked only one question: why? The warrior replied, «There are two types of people on the battlefield — those who save their ass and those who save their honor.» Timur took him into his personal guard.