The enemy was running, or seemed to be, and that was exactly the point. On 12 August 1399, on the banks of the Vorskla River just north of Poltava, Grand Duke Vytautas the Great of Lithuania watched the Tatar army of the Golden Horde turn and flee, and he ordered his knights out of their fortified wagon camp to pursue. It was the decision the Tatars had been waiting for. This was ground that would drink armies: three centuries later, almost the same fields would host the famous Battle of Poltava. But in 1399 the trap belonged to the steppe horsemen, and the ambition that led Vytautas here belonged to a man who dreamed of ruling all the Ruthenian lands.
The road to the Vorskla began with a fallen khan. Tokhtamysh, once master of the Golden Horde, had lost his throne after his war with the mighty conqueror Timur, and fled to Lithuania seeking help to reclaim it. Vytautas saw opportunity. In exchange for aid, Tokhtamysh would surrender his claims over the Ruthenian lands that Vytautas coveted. The grand duke assembled a formidable coalition: Lithuanians and Ruthenians, Poles, Moldavians, and Wallachians, with contingents linked to the Teutonic Knights, whose support he bought by ceding Samogitia. In May 1399 Pope Boniface IX blessed the venture as a crusade, a striking prize for Lithuania, a land only converted to Christianity in 1387 and long a target of crusades itself. From Kiev the great army marched down the Dnieper against the Horde.
The armies met near the Vorskla in early August. Vytautas commanded a powerful force, but the Tatar leaders Temür Qutlugh and the shrewd emir Edigu held an advantage that no muster roll could measure: they knew this kind of war. Temür Qutlugh feigned a retreat, the tried and tested tactic of the steppe, and Vytautas took the bait, leading his forces out of the protective ring of wagons to give chase. When the Lithuanians had drawn far enough from their camp, Edigu's riders swept in from behind and closed the net. Tokhtamysh, judging the day already lost, fled with his men. The Tatars turned the crusaders' own artillery against their cavalry, cut them apart, and seized the wagon fort. The battle ended in a crushing victory for the Golden Horde.
Vytautas escaped with his life, but barely, and the flower of his nobility did not. Of some fifty princes said to have ridden under his banners, around twenty were killed, among them his own cousins Demetrius and Andrei of Polotsk, and his ally Stephen I of Moldavia lost two brothers on that field. Thousands of soldiers never left the Vorskla. The defeat rippled outward for years. Smolensk revolted; Novgorod and Pskov rose against Lithuanian rule; and the disaster ended Vytautas's dreams of southern expansion, turning him instead against Moscow and the Teutonic Knights. Moscow, spared the Lithuanian threat, quietly gained the most. Yet Vytautas may have carried one hard lesson away from his defeat: some believe he learned the feigned-retreat here and used it himself in 1410 to break the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald.
The battlefield lies along the Vorskla River at roughly 48.904 N, 34.122 E, north of Poltava in central Ukraine. From 1,500 to 3,000 feet AGL the meandering Vorskla and the surrounding farmland and steppe are the landmarks; this is nearly the same ground as the 1709 Battle of Poltava. Nearest airport is Poltava (UKHP) just to the south.