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Osprey Campaign #46
Lake Peipus 1242: Battle of the Ice
The battle of Lake Peipus took place in 1242 between the Teutonic Knights and the Russian city-state of Novgorod, led by its inspirational leader Alexandre Nevskii. The Teutonic Knights were a powerful military order, backed by the crusading zeal of Europe, the blessing of the Pope and the support of the Holy Roman Emperor. This battle, although little-known in the West, was important in the history of the medieval eastern Crusades, the Teutonic defeat having a serious effect on future events. David Nicolle's text examines the Crusade against Novgorod and the fierce fighting around the frozen shores of Lake Peipus.
96 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
About the author
David Nicolle
287 books58 followersDavid C. Nicolle is a British historian specialising in the military history of the Middle Ages, with a particular interest in the Middle East.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 19, 2019
As other reviewers have astutely pointed out, it's an ungrateful task to fill even a Campaign booklet with your average medieval battle, for lack of irrefutable facts. A [deleted] Amazon list on "the worst of Osprey" found ready victims in Hastings 1066 with filler of "pot-bellied re-enactors" and yes, Lake Peipus. Maybe I should've listened...
Recorded solely in two hagiograpic chronicles, virtually every aspect of it is conjuncture, mostly centered on the numbers and nationalities involved: several high-ranking Crusaders are unaccounted for and , surprise surprise, Mongol horse archers turned the tide in the battle on the ice.
The facts are numerous enough to debunk Sergei M. Eisenstein's moniker along with the whole movie - alltough I'll never stop loving it in the context of 1938-1941. The trusty boar's head charge of the Teutonic heavy cavalry did not take place ON the ice with certainty & they didn't crash through it into the icy depths. Either way, in the narrows of the lake, the water'd been only 50cm-1m deep, ice included. Most of the fighting was done on the Russian bank, where drifted ice provided a ready-made sort of field fortification, the default Russian way to improve the odds against enemy cavalry in those days.
Yes, David Nicolle has walked & sailed the ground. The captions to the author photographs are among the best parts of the book, along with Angus Mc Bride's artwork -
which leads me to wonder: where is the Men-at-Arms section customarily enclosed under "Opposing Armies" ?? Osprey has titles on Military Orders and Medieval Russian Armies.
Whatever organisational filler used here, it wasn't a discussion on armour or weapons. Such a waste.
Recorded solely in two hagiograpic chronicles, virtually every aspect of it is conjuncture, mostly centered on the numbers and nationalities involved: several high-ranking Crusaders are unaccounted for and , surprise surprise, Mongol horse archers turned the tide in the battle on the ice.
The facts are numerous enough to debunk Sergei M. Eisenstein's moniker along with the whole movie - alltough I'll never stop loving it in the context of 1938-1941. The trusty boar's head charge of the Teutonic heavy cavalry did not take place ON the ice with certainty & they didn't crash through it into the icy depths. Either way, in the narrows of the lake, the water'd been only 50cm-1m deep, ice included. Most of the fighting was done on the Russian bank, where drifted ice provided a ready-made sort of field fortification, the default Russian way to improve the odds against enemy cavalry in those days.
Yes, David Nicolle has walked & sailed the ground. The captions to the author photographs are among the best parts of the book, along with Angus Mc Bride's artwork -
which leads me to wonder: where is the Men-at-Arms section customarily enclosed under "Opposing Armies" ?? Osprey has titles on Military Orders and Medieval Russian Armies.
Whatever organisational filler used here, it wasn't a discussion on armour or weapons. Such a waste.
February 2, 2019
To say that the Crusaders could be overzealous at times would certainly be an understatement. Such was the case in the campaign by the Papal-backed Teutonic Knights against the city of Novgorod and environs near the Baltic Sea in the 1240s in what is now present-day Russia. A contingent of Teutonic Knights and allies including the Sword Brethren of the Baltic, with the blessing of the Pope, marched on the northwest Russian frontier ostensibly to convert the remaining pockets of pagans in the area but also to engage in a misguided showdown with the much-hated Russian Orthodox Christians.
Even sympathizers of the Crusades and the Pope were wary about starting this war, and their fears turned out to be warranted--and also a prescient omen for later would-be conquerors including Napoleon and Hitler.
The culmination of this campaign, and the engagement that ended it, was the legendary Battle of the Ice in the spring of 1242, in which the Crusades fought the Russians on the solidly frozen waters and shore of massive Lake Peipus a few hundred kilometers west of Novgorod. The hero of the hour was Alexander Nevsky, a forceful but apparently likeable warrior who led an army of mixed ethnicity, including Turks and Mongols, against the pseudo-Aryan Crusaders. Taking a defensive position ashore, and--according to the speculation of military scholars--using the jagged stacked-ice floes that result from wave action prior to freezing as a kind of fortified defensive obstacle, Nevsky and his troops withstood a wedge offensive by the Crusaders that over the course of the short battle resulted in encirclement by the Russians and a rout that sent the undermanned Crusaders scurrying. One factor that turned the battle tide was the surprise effectiveness against the Crusades of Nevsky’s Turkish-Mongol horse archers, whose skills and swiftness outdid anything the Teutonic Knights possessed. Other factors leading to Nevsky's victory, according to author David Nicolle, included overconfidence by the smaller Crusade army and their underestimation of the Russians' ability to forge defensive military alliances among the various tribes and ethnic groups.
As a result of the failed campaign subsequent popes after Gregory realized that a more diplomatic stance toward the Christian brothers of the East would do more to advance the cause of Christ and economic trade than brute force.
I first learned about Alexander Nevsky from Sergei Eisenstein’s classic eponymous 1938 Soviet biographical film. In that visually stunning film he is portrayed as a flawless, square-jawed, gregarious, blond-haired, larger-than-life Russian hero and the Teutons are obviously meant to suggest the imminent Nazi threat. As this book shows, however, Nevsky was much more a badass than Stalin's and Eisenstein's white-washed hagiography. Even so, what little we do know about Nevsky and these battles, as the author suggests, comes mostly from scholarly speculation, from our understanding of cultural and military norms of the time and from romanticized and heroic literary odes written according to the biases and embellishments of authors who favored either the Russian or Crusader sides.
As kick-ass warriors go, Nevsky seems to have been one of the more fair-handed. Sure he hung people he considered traitors, but he also was not so power-hungry and bloodthirsty that he craved spoils and territory or the heads of his enemies after battle. If a battle was a defensive one, as was the case at Peipus, Nevsky did his job, routed the enemy and ended it right there.
The book's text is of the standard textbook ilk, and most of it is devoted to background about the geopolitical, cultural, religious and military situation of the period leading up to the campaign and the war. The shifting alliances of the Middle Ages in this part of northern Europe were so complicated that they make the ones on the continent prior to World War I seem simple to comprehend by comparison. I'm sure it's no fault of author Nicolle that after a short while my head began to spin into hopeless confusion trying to keep straight all the players and their fragile alliances and motives.
In any case, from reading this I learned a lot about a time and place of which I previously had almost zero knowledge. I think it's a good entre into more reading about the Crusades, which is one of my reading resolutions for 2012. I think it might also spark an interest in the Mongols, whose influence at this time of history was great. The Mongols were spoilers, in a sense, because at the time of the Crusades-Russian conflict they were giving both Nevsky and his Crusader foes an additional headache by sweeping in from the east both into the heart of Russia and Central Europe in the area of Hungary. Interestingly, and to the bafflement of subsequent Russian historians and propagandists who tried to puff up the legend of Nevsky as the foe of invaders, Nevsky decided to make peace with the Mongol conquerors rather than fight them. Nevsky was smart enough to realize that the Mongols were too plentiful and unbeatable, and that, more importantly, they were more tolerant of local and religious customs than the overzealous and bloodthirsty Papal Christians.
The book, on the whole, does a decent job of cutting through the legend--built up through time by layers of embellished romanticized hyperbole--to figure out what likely happened, especially as the exact locations of the battle sites on Lake Peipus are unknown and disputed. If nothing else, the story proves that, wherever wars can be fought, they will be. I doubt that Peipus was the first instance of warfare being fought on a frozen waterway (it certainly was not the last, as World War II proved), but it has gone down in legend as the most famous.
This book exhibits the usual strengths of this ever-expanding series of pithy primer military history books published variously by Osprey in Britain and Praeger in the United States, including liberally illustrated spreads and superb 3-D maps (my primary attraction to these books) that are superior to anything else in print. I also like that each of the books contains a concluding chapter devoted to what the famous battlefields look like today (in some cases, the battlefields have been erased by time, natural forces and human encroachment).
Rather bafflingly the book is liberally littered with woodcuts, carvings, statues and other period illustrations of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents, even though the main text itself never mentions or explains it. I think it is meant to lend period flavor, since the artwork dates from the 12th and 13th centuries. But, like some of the text in the book, it feels like padding.
To some, the Battle on the Ice at Lake Peipus might seem like a quaint, isolated and irrelevant incident in history, but yet again it proves to me to be yet another highly instructive example of how humans socialize, ally and fight--and keep making the same mistakes.
Even sympathizers of the Crusades and the Pope were wary about starting this war, and their fears turned out to be warranted--and also a prescient omen for later would-be conquerors including Napoleon and Hitler.
The culmination of this campaign, and the engagement that ended it, was the legendary Battle of the Ice in the spring of 1242, in which the Crusades fought the Russians on the solidly frozen waters and shore of massive Lake Peipus a few hundred kilometers west of Novgorod. The hero of the hour was Alexander Nevsky, a forceful but apparently likeable warrior who led an army of mixed ethnicity, including Turks and Mongols, against the pseudo-Aryan Crusaders. Taking a defensive position ashore, and--according to the speculation of military scholars--using the jagged stacked-ice floes that result from wave action prior to freezing as a kind of fortified defensive obstacle, Nevsky and his troops withstood a wedge offensive by the Crusaders that over the course of the short battle resulted in encirclement by the Russians and a rout that sent the undermanned Crusaders scurrying. One factor that turned the battle tide was the surprise effectiveness against the Crusades of Nevsky’s Turkish-Mongol horse archers, whose skills and swiftness outdid anything the Teutonic Knights possessed. Other factors leading to Nevsky's victory, according to author David Nicolle, included overconfidence by the smaller Crusade army and their underestimation of the Russians' ability to forge defensive military alliances among the various tribes and ethnic groups.
As a result of the failed campaign subsequent popes after Gregory realized that a more diplomatic stance toward the Christian brothers of the East would do more to advance the cause of Christ and economic trade than brute force.
I first learned about Alexander Nevsky from Sergei Eisenstein’s classic eponymous 1938 Soviet biographical film. In that visually stunning film he is portrayed as a flawless, square-jawed, gregarious, blond-haired, larger-than-life Russian hero and the Teutons are obviously meant to suggest the imminent Nazi threat. As this book shows, however, Nevsky was much more a badass than Stalin's and Eisenstein's white-washed hagiography. Even so, what little we do know about Nevsky and these battles, as the author suggests, comes mostly from scholarly speculation, from our understanding of cultural and military norms of the time and from romanticized and heroic literary odes written according to the biases and embellishments of authors who favored either the Russian or Crusader sides.
As kick-ass warriors go, Nevsky seems to have been one of the more fair-handed. Sure he hung people he considered traitors, but he also was not so power-hungry and bloodthirsty that he craved spoils and territory or the heads of his enemies after battle. If a battle was a defensive one, as was the case at Peipus, Nevsky did his job, routed the enemy and ended it right there.
The book's text is of the standard textbook ilk, and most of it is devoted to background about the geopolitical, cultural, religious and military situation of the period leading up to the campaign and the war. The shifting alliances of the Middle Ages in this part of northern Europe were so complicated that they make the ones on the continent prior to World War I seem simple to comprehend by comparison. I'm sure it's no fault of author Nicolle that after a short while my head began to spin into hopeless confusion trying to keep straight all the players and their fragile alliances and motives.
In any case, from reading this I learned a lot about a time and place of which I previously had almost zero knowledge. I think it's a good entre into more reading about the Crusades, which is one of my reading resolutions for 2012. I think it might also spark an interest in the Mongols, whose influence at this time of history was great. The Mongols were spoilers, in a sense, because at the time of the Crusades-Russian conflict they were giving both Nevsky and his Crusader foes an additional headache by sweeping in from the east both into the heart of Russia and Central Europe in the area of Hungary. Interestingly, and to the bafflement of subsequent Russian historians and propagandists who tried to puff up the legend of Nevsky as the foe of invaders, Nevsky decided to make peace with the Mongol conquerors rather than fight them. Nevsky was smart enough to realize that the Mongols were too plentiful and unbeatable, and that, more importantly, they were more tolerant of local and religious customs than the overzealous and bloodthirsty Papal Christians.
The book, on the whole, does a decent job of cutting through the legend--built up through time by layers of embellished romanticized hyperbole--to figure out what likely happened, especially as the exact locations of the battle sites on Lake Peipus are unknown and disputed. If nothing else, the story proves that, wherever wars can be fought, they will be. I doubt that Peipus was the first instance of warfare being fought on a frozen waterway (it certainly was not the last, as World War II proved), but it has gone down in legend as the most famous.
This book exhibits the usual strengths of this ever-expanding series of pithy primer military history books published variously by Osprey in Britain and Praeger in the United States, including liberally illustrated spreads and superb 3-D maps (my primary attraction to these books) that are superior to anything else in print. I also like that each of the books contains a concluding chapter devoted to what the famous battlefields look like today (in some cases, the battlefields have been erased by time, natural forces and human encroachment).
Rather bafflingly the book is liberally littered with woodcuts, carvings, statues and other period illustrations of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents, even though the main text itself never mentions or explains it. I think it is meant to lend period flavor, since the artwork dates from the 12th and 13th centuries. But, like some of the text in the book, it feels like padding.
To some, the Battle on the Ice at Lake Peipus might seem like a quaint, isolated and irrelevant incident in history, but yet again it proves to me to be yet another highly instructive example of how humans socialize, ally and fight--and keep making the same mistakes.
June 13, 2019
Oh well... over the years I've came to the realization that when it comes to booklets from Osprey, it's like with that box of chocolates Forrest Gump talks about - you never really know what you're gonna get. In case of this particular volume, content-wise, the value consists of couple of specific points being clarified:
* Teutonic knights drowning en masse after going through the ice is most probably a myth. Don't believe movies made for propaganda purposes.
* Actual involvement of Teutonic Knights in entire affair was of limited scope, it was the Sword Brothers who were the driving force and Teutonic Knights 'proper' were most probably relieved to get rid of them.
* Nicolle manages to provide pretty decent overview of geo-political situation in northern Russia at the time of the battle.
In regard of the campaign and battle itself, this booklet is a pretty good illustration of how difficult it is to write anything informed about that period. Author relies pretty much exclusively on two medieval chronicles. Indeed, direct quotes from those two sources provide bulk of 'factual' information in Nicolle's narrative. Outside of those references, it is impossible for the author not to venture into land of qualified guesses and speculations. There simply isn't enough information about those events to do better here.
An area where I do find author's effort sub-par is in the analysis of consequences of this battle. Arrogance of western historian writing about 'east' raises its unattractive head when Nicolle dismisses the events of 1242 as local affair without any real consequences. Well, I beg to differ, Lake Peipus put an end to Germanic expansion into Slavic territories from that direction. If Teutonic Order managed to prevail and established permanent presence in the area, history of Eastern Europe could have taken entirely different course.
Overall, Lake Peipus is a usefull little volume and pretty much what's out there for english-speaking readers interested in the period.
* Teutonic knights drowning en masse after going through the ice is most probably a myth. Don't believe movies made for propaganda purposes.
* Actual involvement of Teutonic Knights in entire affair was of limited scope, it was the Sword Brothers who were the driving force and Teutonic Knights 'proper' were most probably relieved to get rid of them.
* Nicolle manages to provide pretty decent overview of geo-political situation in northern Russia at the time of the battle.
In regard of the campaign and battle itself, this booklet is a pretty good illustration of how difficult it is to write anything informed about that period. Author relies pretty much exclusively on two medieval chronicles. Indeed, direct quotes from those two sources provide bulk of 'factual' information in Nicolle's narrative. Outside of those references, it is impossible for the author not to venture into land of qualified guesses and speculations. There simply isn't enough information about those events to do better here.
An area where I do find author's effort sub-par is in the analysis of consequences of this battle. Arrogance of western historian writing about 'east' raises its unattractive head when Nicolle dismisses the events of 1242 as local affair without any real consequences. Well, I beg to differ, Lake Peipus put an end to Germanic expansion into Slavic territories from that direction. If Teutonic Order managed to prevail and established permanent presence in the area, history of Eastern Europe could have taken entirely different course.
Overall, Lake Peipus is a usefull little volume and pretty much what's out there for english-speaking readers interested in the period.
August 23, 2020
Minu arvamuse leiab blogist https://triinuraamatud.wordpress.com/...
December 3, 2019
A very strong work offering up a great deal of exciting information that sparks a great deal of desire for further reading.
December 13, 2020
Entertaining read. Read this as a primer for Eisenstein’s ‘Alexander Nevsky’
December 22, 2013
A very interesting book about a fascinating battle. I found his theory that there were Mongol archers on the Russian side to be little more than wishful thinking, but on the whole, the book is well organized and easy to follow, thanks to a wealth of helpful maps, diagrams, and photos. Russian speakers are also advised to read Lyodovoye Poboishche, by the USSR Archaeological Institute, ed. Karaev, for a more scientific approach.
November 24, 2023
Leans heavily into the background of the battle rather than going into the battle itself in a particularly exhaustive level of detail. Explains this away by highlighting the lack of reliable resources & the background detail is interesting in its own right. Also provides an interesting (to the uninitiated like myself anyway) insight into how war gaming works to the extent I’d almost be tempted to try.
February 15, 2016
It's slow going at the start -- with lots of "new" players on the historical scene without a lot of clear geographical reference points, but it ultimately does a decent job putting the confluence of events leading to the battles between Alexander Nevskii and the attacking European forces.
April 3, 2017
It has the usual marks of a Nicolle book: fair analysis and confusing prose.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews