In late 1240 Batu Khan stormed Kyiv, the “mother of Rus’ cities”, after a fierce assault. The great city was sacked and largely destroyed, ending the golden age of Kievan Rus’ and opening the road into Latin Europe.
The siege of Kyiv in 1240 destroyed the greatest city of the Rus’ and ended the era of Kievan Rus’. Its fall cleared the way for the Mongol invasion of Poland and Hungary the following year.
After conquering the north-east in 1238, Batu spent a year on the steppe before turning on southern Rus’ in 1240. Pereyaslavl and Chernigov fell, and the horde closed on Kyiv — a city past its political prime but still vast, wealthy, and revered as the cradle of Rus’ Christianity. It was held by the voivode Dmytro for the absent Danylo of Galicia.
The Mongols massed their siege engines against the walls and kept up a battering that, the chronicles say, never ceased day or night. When the ramparts were breached the defenders fell back to the inner city and made a final stand around the Church of the Tithes, which collapsed under the press of people who had climbed onto it for refuge.
The city was stormed, sacked, and burned; the wounded Dmytro was spared by Batu for his courage.
Kyiv was left desolate — when the friar John of Plano Carpini rode through a few years later he counted barely two hundred houses standing amid the bones of the dead. With the Rus’ crushed, the Mongols crossed into Latin Europe in 1241, defeating the Poles at Legnica and destroying the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohi.