Riazan was sacked after being taken by assault and all the towns of the principality met the same fate.
The Souzdalian Prince George now came forward and sent an army commanded by his son, who met the invaders at Kolomna on the Oka. The Tartars burned Moscow and then besieged the Vladimir of the Kaliazma, which George II had abandoned to seek help in the North. His two sons were charged with the defense of the capital. The princes and knights of the aristocratic houses, certain that there was no alternative but death or slavery, prepared to fight to the end.
The women and the nobles prayed the Bishop to give them the tonsure and when the Tartars pushed into the town by all its gates the conquered Russians, fighting to the last, fell back into the cathedral, where they were slaughtered, men, women and children, in the midst of a general conflagration. Fourteen towns and a multitude of villages in the grand principality were given over to the flame by the end of the year 1238.
The Tartar commander then went to seek the Grand Prince himself who was encamped on the Sit, almost on the frontier of the possessions of Novgorod. He in turn was defeated with the same dire story of blood and disaster which had marked the course of the Asiatics from the beginning.
The Tartars now advanced upon Novgorod itself, but here at last the elements combined to aid the hard-pressed Russians and, baffled by the swollen rivers and endless marshes, the invaders turned back to the southeast when fifty miles away from the ancient capital.
The Tartars then spent two years, 1239 and 1240, in ravaging Southern Russia, burning Pereiaslaf and Tchernigof in spite of desperate defense by the Russian princes.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
