Battle of the Alta River

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The Battle of Alta River was a 1068[1] clash on the Alta River between Polovtsy nomads on the one hand and Kievan Rus' forces of Grand Prince Iziaslav I of Kiev, Prince Sviatoslav of Chernigov, and Prince Vsevolod of Periaslavl on the other in which the Rus' forces were routed and fled back to Kiev and Chernigov in some disarray.[2] The battle led to an uprising in Kiev that briefly deposed Grand Prince Iziaslav, thus showing the power of the veche and the common people to influence princely politics in Kievan Rus' (particularly in Kiev and also in Novgorod the Great.)

The Polovtsy were first mentioned in the Russian Primary Chronicle under the year 1055, when Prince Vsevolod drew up a peace treaty with them. In spite of the treaty, in 1061, the Polovtsy breached the earthworks and palisades constructed by Princes Vladimir (d. 1015) and Yaroslav (d. 1054) and defeated an army led by Prince Vsevolod that had marched out to intercept them. Following the unsuccessful Battle on the Alta River near Pereislavl, Iziaslav and Vsevolod fled back to Kiev and their unwillingness to arm the general populace to march out and fight the raiders led to an uprising in the city. A veche (public assembly) was convened in the marketplace and the people there demanded arms to fight the Polovtsy. When these were not forthcoming, they ransacked the house of Voevoda Konstantin.[3] The Kievans freed Prince Vseslav of Polotsk, who had been imprisoned earlier by Iziaslav, Vsevolod, and Sviatoslav, and placed him on the Kievan throne in hopes that he could stop the Polovtsy. Iziaslav, for his part, fled to his father-in-law, Boleslaw II of Poland, who supported him with arms with which he returned to Kiev the following May (1069) and took back the throne.

In Iziaslav's absence, Prince Sviatoslav managed to defeat a much larger Polovetsian army on November 1, 1068 and stem the tide of Polovetsian raids. A small skirmish in 1071 was the only disturbance by the Polovtsy for the next two decades.[2] Thus, while the Battle of Alta River was a disgrace for Kievan Rus', Sviatoslav's victory the following year releaved the Polovtsy threat to Kiev and Chernigov for a considerable period.

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[edit] References

  1. ^ Alta article in Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (Russian)
  2. ^ a b Janet Martin, Medieval Russia 980-1584 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 49.
  3. ^ Lavrent'evskaia Letopis' (Povest Vremennikh Let), in Polnoe Sobranie Russkikh Letopisei, Vol. 1, cols. 170-1; Boris D. Grekov, Kiev Rus' trans. by Y. Sdobnikov (Moscow, Foreign Language Publishing House. 1959), 656-7; Martin, Medieval Russia, 35, 49; Mikhail Tikhomirov, The Towns of Ancient Rus' , trans. by Y. Sdobnikov (Moscow, Foreign Language Publishing House. 1959), 198-199.