A Tatar interpretation of the battle of Kulikovo Field, 1380: Rustam Nabiev

Abstract

Although no contemporary Tatar source presented a Tatar view of the famous battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380 the modern Kazan’ Tatar historian Rustam Nabiev has published a major revisionist reinterpretation of the event based upon what he considers an objective analysis of fourteenth-century Rus'-Tatar history and relations. Nabiev concludes that the battle did not happen at all as narrated in Muscovite literary works of the Kulikovo Cycle. In reality Muscovite Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich did not defeat Emir Mamai on the Don River; instead Dmitrii and his princely retinue participated in the defeat of Mamai by the army of Khan Tokhtamysh in the region of the Northern Donets and Kalka rivers. Nabiev's critique of the Russian national paradigm of the battle has some merit but it overlooks previous Western scholarship which had already made many of the same points, oversimplifies current Russian scholarship about the battle, and arbitrarily manipulates the sources to create a fantastic and fictitious scenario. Even so his views deserve to be refuted on scholarly grounds, not by an ad hominem dismissal as a reflection of “Tatar chauvinism.”