Battles that decided whether Russia would exist as an independent state -- and that no English-language history has ever properly told.
In the summer of 1572, a Crimean-Ottoman army of about 120,000 marched on Moscow, not to raid but to make Muscovy an Ottoman vassal. The year before, the same khan had burned the capital and carried off tens of thousands of Russians to the slave markets. He was stopped at Molodi by a prince whom Ivan the Terrible had previously arrested and tortured, fighting behind prefabricated wooden wall sections hauled into position on wagons. After five days, roughly twenty thousand Crimean warriors made it home. Vorotynsky was arrested again the following year and died under torture.
On November 30, 1700, an eighteen-year-old Swedish king attacked through a blinding snowstorm with eight thousand men and destroyed a Russian army four times that size in a single afternoon. Peter the Great lost every gun he had. He melted down church bells to cast new ones, rebuilt the army over nine years, and at Poltava reversed the result.
The sources sit in Russian and Ottoman archives, effectively invisible. This book opens them.
Russia Untold: 20 Stories Never Written in English is Book 2 of Untold Histories - documented military and civil history, one nation per volume, recovered from primary sources and told as narrative.