“...And they were all suffocated”: Russian Archbishop Peter and Mongol ‘chemical weapons’ of the 13th century

Abstract

In carrying out a global project to conquer the world, Genghis Khan and his successors mobilized not only the human resources of conquered peoples, but also adopted the most advanced military technologies of their time. Many of these technologies were circulating through the entire continent due to Mongol campaigns of the 13th century. However, searching for definitive information about use of such innovations is quite difficult, due to the understandable fact of the confusion of terminology in sources written by peoples both familiar and unfamiliar with these technologies. The information from Old Rus’ chronicles (the Novgorod First chronicle of the Elder Recension), Latin (Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, and Jan Długosz’s Annales), and Chinese (Yuan Shi) sources compared in this article with information collected from reports on the excavations of archeological monuments in Central-Eastern Europe, allows us to speculate that one of these technologies — the use of poisonous smoke for military purposes — was employed by the Mongols while their conquest of the strongest principality of the Northeastern Rus’ in 1237–1238. In particular, during the assault of its capital, Vladimir on Klyazma (February, 1238), such toxic weapon was used to suffocate the bishop, the Grand Duke’s family members and nobles, who were trying to escape on the quires of the Dormition Cathedral, while the church treasures were obtained by the conquerors. On the whole, this is the kind of weapon that the Russian Archbishop Peter had in mind when he mentioned the poisonous weapons of the Mongols “for attack” during his interrogation by Pope Innocent IV and his cardinals on the eve of the First Council of Lyon in 1245.