Who won the Battle of the Ice?
Alexander Nevsky and the army of Novgorod won the Battle of the Ice on 5 April 1242, fought on and beside the frozen Lake Peipus. They defeated the knights of the Livonian Order, part of the Teutonic crusading movement, and halted the push of the Catholic military orders east into Rus. The dramatic image of knights drowning as the ice broke comes mostly from later legend and a famous 1938 film.6
In the spring of 1242 Novgorod struck back at the crusading knights of the Baltic, who had pushed east into its lands. On the frozen edge of Lake Peipus they met Prince Alexander Nevsky, already famous for beating the Swedes on the Neva, and were driven back in one of the most storied battles of medieval Russia. What actually happened that day is far less certain than the legend, and the gap between the two is a story in itself.7
Crusade on the Baltic frontier
Through the 13th century the German military orders, the Teutonic Knights and their Livonian branch, pushed the Northern Crusades east, conquering and converting the peoples of the eastern Baltic. The Livonian Order, founded in 1202 as the Sword Brethren, had been merged into the Teutonic Order in 1237 as an autonomous branch. Britannica notes that Pope Gregory IX urged the knights to Christianize the region, and soon after 1240 they invaded the lands of the Republic of Novgorod, taking the town of Pskov and threatening Novgorod itself.8 › Battle of Płowce, 1331
Novgorod was a republic that elected its princes rather than obeying them. In 1236 it had elected the young Alexander Yaroslavich, son of Grand Prince Yaroslav of Vladimir, as its prince, a post Britannica describes as little more than military commander. In 1240 he beat a Swedish force where the Izhora flows into the Neva and won the name Nevsky, of the Neva, but he then quarreled with the city and was expelled within months. When the knights came, Novgorod had to invite him back.9
Nevsky and the two armies
Alexander retook Pskov and carried the war into the lands of the Chud, the Estonians, on the western side of the lake. His brother Andrei joined him with troops sent by their father, the Grand Prince. On the other side stood the Livonian knights with the men of Bishop Hermann of Dorpat, the modern Tartu, and Estonian foot soldiers. Some historians, among them David Nicolle, have suggested that Danish vassals from northern Estonia also took part.10
The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, written by a German author in the 1290s, says the bishop hurried his men to join the brothers' army but that both brought too few people. It also says Alexander came with bowmen without number, and Nicolle has speculated that these may have been steppe horse archers serving Novgorod.11
The battle in the sources
The oldest version of the Novgorod First Chronicle, probably written in the middle of the 14th century, gives the fullest early account. Alexander drew up the men of Novgorod at Lake Chud, as the Russians call Peipus, at Uzmen by Raven's Rock. The Germans and Chuds rode at them, driving through their army like a wedge, and there was a great battle. Then the Chuds fled, and the Novgorodians pursued and cut them down for seven versts, some seven kilometers, across the ice to the Subol shore. The chronicle dates the fight to Saturday, 5 April 1242, a date in the Julian calendar used throughout medieval Rus; the later Pskov chronicles give 1 April.12
The German account is very different. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle says the battle began with a bold assault by the Rus archers, that the brothers' banners were soon in the midst of them and that many on both sides fell dead on the grass. Then the brothers' army was surrounded by a far larger Rus force, which the chronicler puts at sixty men for every knight. Some of the men of Dorpat escaped. The chronicle names no lake and mentions no ice at all.13
Both accounts agree that Alexander won. The flank attack that many later books describe, with the Novgorodian line sagging and Alexander enveloping the knights from the side, is not in the Novgorod chronicle; Donald Ostrowski finds it in modern textbooks rather than in the medieval sources.14
How big was the battle?
Nobody knows, and every figure comes with a source attached. For the losses, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle records twenty brother-knights killed and six captured. The Novgorod First Chronicle claims 400 Germans killed, 50 taken to Novgorod and a countless number of Chuds; its younger redaction raises the German dead to 500. Nicolle, and the Soviet scholars Begunov, Kleinenberg and Shaskol'skii, argue that the figures can be reconciled if the German count covered only the members of the Order, whose Livonian branch then had between 50 and 100 knights. John Fennell, by contrast, judged the Russian total of 450 killed and captured a clear exaggeration.15
The armies are even harder to count. Ostrowski collects the modern estimates. Nicolle reconstructs about 2,600 men on the crusader side, including about 1,000 Estonian foot, and about 5,000 for Novgorod, while admitting that the Novgorodian figure involves inspired guesswork. Aleksandr Shcherbakov and Igor' Dzys' propose only 700 to 750 crusaders against 1,700 to 2,000 Novgorodians. At the other extreme, the Soviet military historian Razin estimated 10,000 to 12,000 crusaders and 15,000 to 17,000 Novgorodians, and Kirpichnikov 10,000 to 17,000 for each side. In Ostrowski's summary, it is anyone's guess.16
Legend and the breaking ice
The most famous image of the battle, armored knights crashing through the ice and drowning, owes far more to later legend and to Sergei Eisenstein's celebrated 1938 film than to the medieval sources. In a close study of the texts, Ostrowski shows how the story grew in layers. The earliest Russian chronicles say only that the Germans were beaten at the lake and chased across the ice. The Life of Alexander Nevsky adds that the clash of weapons sounded as though the frozen lake moved and that blood covered the ice.17
Only the Moscow chronicles of the late 15th and early 16th centuries first say that some of the enemy drowned, and the miniatures of the Illustrated Chronicle show heads among the ice floes. The picture of the ice giving way under the whole fleeing army of knights, Ostrowski argues, appears in the historiography only after Eisenstein's film, whose director, according to his biographer Marie Seton, modeled the scene on the battle in heaven in Milton's Paradise Lost. Ostrowski does not call the breaking ice impossible, since lake ice in early April can be treacherous, but no medieval source describes it.18
Aftermath
The defeat checked the eastward advance of the crusading orders. Britannica credits Alexander with continuing to fight the Swedes and Germans until he had stopped their expansion, and with victories over the Lithuanians and the Finnic peoples. In the Novgorod chronicle the prisoners were led back to Novgorod; in the Pskov chronicles they walk barefoot across the ice. The frontier between Catholic Livonia and Orthodox Rus in the region held for centuries.19
Alexander's own career took a different turn. While he fought in the west, the Mongols were conquering most of the Rus lands. He chose to serve the khans of the Golden Horde, became grand prince of Vladimir in 1252 and helped force Novgorod to accept the Mongol census in 1258. Britannica's historian Richard Hellie calls him one of the great military commanders of his time and also a willing collaborator with the Mongols. He died at Gorodets on the Volga on 14 November 1263.20 › Batu Khan
Legacy and memory
Alexander was venerated as a local saint by 1381 and canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547. The Order of Alexander Nevsky was created in 1725, after the war with Sweden, and in July 1942, with German armies deep inside the Soviet Union, Stalin proclaimed him a national hero and created a new military order in his name. Eisenstein's film, released in 1938, had already fixed the battle in the popular imagination.21
For historians the Battle of the Ice is now as much a lesson in reading sources as a battle. It was a real defeat for the Livonian Order and a real check to its advance, but it may have been a clash of a few thousand men or fewer, fought partly on the shore, and its most famous scene was added centuries later. For the orders' later struggles in the east, see the Battle of Grunwald, 1410.22
