Chelubey: a name younger than its battle
Peresvet's enemy had no name for nearly three centuries. It was apparently invented by a Kiev monk around 1680 for its oriental flavor and ring.
Ask anyone who encountered the monk Peresvet on Kulikovo Field. The answer will be the same: Chelubey. This name appears in school textbooks, in reproductions, in speeches. Yet it predates the battle itself by almost three centuries. In 1380, there was no Chelubey—neither on the field nor in the first accounts of him.
What we have before us is not a memory error, but story about how myth builds itself up with details. Peresvet's Enemy is a convenient opportunity to trace this through texts: the nameless figure acquired names one after another, each revealing the fears and literary fashions of its time.
The fight might not have happened
Let's start with an inconvenient fact. The oldest monument of the Kulikovo cycle contains no duel at all. "Zadonshchina," created at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, depicts Peresvet as a living warrior in the thick of the fray, not as a duelist who fell before the battle.
The single combat scene appears only in "The Tale of the Battle of Mamai." According to the common dating, this story dates to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, although this is debatable: some scholars suggest an earlier core of the text. In any case, more than a century separates the battle from the full account of the duel. Over such a period, memory is more likely to invent a detail than to retain it.
And the scene is constructed according to a recognizable matrix. A giant alien with a long spear steps before the line and challenges them to combat; he is answered not by the strongest, but by the most righteous; the strongman perishes, and his fall determines the outcome. This is the framework of the story of David and Goliath, transferred to Russian soil. The ancient Russian scribe thought in Scripture. For him, the duel before the battle was a sermon, not a report: it is not muscle that wins, but truth. The unarmored monk slaying the giant was instantly understood by a medieval mind.
The enemy first assumed this role—the doomed Goliath. The name came later. And since the role was literary, it could be filled with anything suitable.
Four stages, four enemies
The "Tale" has come down to us in over four hundred copies, and Peresvet's opponent changed his name from edition to edition. If you lay out these names in order, you can see what each era feared and admired.
At first, there is no name at all—this is the first of four stages, nameless. In the oldest manuscripts of the main redaction, he is simply "a Pecheneg from the Tatar regiment," "a hero from the Horde," "an evil Tatar." By the 15th century, the word "Pecheneg" had long since become a literary archaism: it was used to describe any steppe nomad. The enemy here is not a person, but a function: the embodiment of foreignness, a threat from the steppe.
Then comes Tavrul. This name is worth a closer look: it reveals the cuisine of this ancient Russian author.
The scribes apparently didn't invent Tavrul, but borrowed it. A name with the same sound appears in the Hypatian Chronicle dating back to 1240, during the storming of Kyiv by Batu Khan's troops. The connection, however, remains hypothetical: we have no direct evidence that the duelist was named after this Tavrul. But the logic is clear: the author, seeking a formidable name for the Horde warrior, most likely discovered an old text he knew and borrowed the ready-made name of an enemy from a previous invasion.
The memory of Batu's devastation seemed to lend a ready-made, menacing name to the new plot. The real-life Taurul of the 13th century and the duelist of the 14th century have nothing in common, except that both were intended to be frightening.
Next comes Temir-murza. "Temir" means "iron" in Turkic, and "murza" is a noble title; together they mean "iron prince." The name is established in the so-called Cyprian, or Synodal, edition of the "Tale" of the 16th-17th centuries.
His origins are no less clear than those of Tavrul. At the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, Rus' and the surrounding lands were shaken by a new conqueror—Tamerlane, Timur. The nameless Horde leader was given a name that resounded with the military might of the era. Tavrul carried with him the memory of Batu, Temir-murza that of Tamerlane.
And only at the very end of this series does Chelubey appear. He doesn't appear in the 15th-16th-century manuscripts. He comes from a printed book, not a chronicle, not from oral tradition. And that's a whole other story.
A machine called "Synopsis"
This book, the "Kiev Synopsis," is the first large-scale printed work on Russian history. It is believed to have been compiled by Archimandrite Innokenty Gizel of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, with the participation, according to one version, of cellarer Panteleimon Kokhanovsky. The first edition was published by the Lavra's printing house in 1674.
To understand the power of this book, imagine the situation. Before Synopsis, there simply was no coherent, accessible, printed account of the Russian past—only scattered chronicles in monastery vaults, inaccessible to the average reader. Synopsis, for the first time, stitched these disparate pieces of information into a coherent narrative and published it. It didn't describe history, but rather assembled it, deciding which stories would be incorporated into the common memory and which would remain in the margins. Before Synopsis, the story of the Battle of Kulikovo existed only in a few manuscripts: it was print that made it part of the shared, national memory.
And the book became an unrivaled bestseller. Over the course of a century and a half, it went through some twenty-five editions, with the last synodal editions appearing until 1861. It was never formally approved as a textbook, but due to the lack of alternatives, it was used in seminaries, schools, and at home by statesmen and even 18th-century historians, including Lomonosov himself, who relied on the "Synopsis" in his work on Russian history. Whatever found its way onto the book's pages became the official version of the past for several generations.
The name Chelubey doesn't appear there immediately—and this is evident from the editions themselves. In the first two, 1674 and 1678, Peresvet's rival remains nameless. Chelubey appears only in the third edition, around 1680. This comparison of the editions is the key clue: before the third printing, the name is missing; after, it is. The compiler, apparently, inserted it to enhance the oriental flavor and add resonance to the scene. (See: Peshtich, S. L. "Synopsis" as a Historical Source // Transactions of the Department of Old Russian Literature. Moscow; Leningrad: Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1959. Vol. XV. pp. 284–298.)
Then the circulation took over. Thanks to the huge print runs of the "Synopsis," the name became popular and gradually displaced Tavrul and Temir-murza even from later copies of the "Tale" itself. The printing press proved stronger than the manuscript tradition: one mass-produced edition versus two centuries of monastic copyists, and the copyists lost.
A name from another century and another land
The most curious thing is that the name that was awarded to the Horde man of 1380 apparently has no connection to the Golden Horde.
The most common reconstruction derives it from the Turkic "çelebi," meaning "noble, learned, lord," combined with the title "bey." Literally, it means "noble prince" or "learned lord." There are other versions (for example, that it's simply a Turkic nickname, not a title), so it's worth parsing the name with a grain of salt. But if the main version is correct, the picture is telling.
The title "Chelebi" developed and became established in the Ottoman Empire, in Anatolia, in the 14th and 15th centuries. In the Golden Horde, with its Kipchak-Mongol linguistic layer, such a name is not recorded in the 14th century. Therefore, the name appears anachronistic—both in time and geography.
There's also a semantic inconsistency. In Ottoman tradition, "Çelebi" is an educated prince, poet, or scholar; this was the title of Sultan Bayezid I's sons, Musa and Mehmed Çelebi. It seems odd for this refined literary title to appear on the tip of a spear, in the role of a heavily armed warrior.
Where did the Kyiv monk get this word from? Most likely, from his own time. The late 17th century was the time of the Chyhyryn campaigns and wars with Turkey; names like Çelebi-bey, Islam-Çelebi, and Çelebi-murza constantly appeared in ambassadorial books on Russo-Crimean and Russo-Turkish affairs. Bearers of such names existed, but they all lived after the Battle of Kulikovo and belonged to the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate, not to Mamai's Horde. The logic is the same as with Tavrul and Temir-murza: the enemy takes its name from the century of its author. Only this time, the name was recorded on the printing press—and so it remained forever.
Frankly, the scribe's motives here have to be partially speculated upon: he left no notes, and we can only reconstruct why he chose "Chelubey" from circumstantial evidence. But the circumstantial evidence is all too consistent.
How the name came to us
Chelubey's image spread more and more widely from Synopsis. First, it was popular print: folk images with captions like "the sinister Pecheneg Chelubey" were printed in large quantities, and this image became the ready-made embodiment of the enemy in the peasant hut. Then it was the school: the authors of 19th-century textbooks, Kaidanov and Ilovaisky, drew on the established synopsis tradition, and the duel entered all anthologies as a symbol of sacrificial heroism.
The 20th century put an end to the situation. Mikhail Avilov's 1943 painting "The Duel of Peresvet and Chelubey," which was widely used in Soviet textbooks, finally cemented both the scene and the name. But that's a separate story about how painting replaces documentation. We'll return to it in the next issue.
Why does a myth need a name?
What really happened on Kulikovo Field? Perhaps it was a real duel, whose name has been erased. Perhaps it was a literary device, growing out of the story of Goliath. But it certainly wasn't Chelubey: that name didn't appear in 1380, nor in the first accounts of the battle.
Pecheneg, Tavrul, Temir-Murza, Chelubey—behind each name are alien fears and the fashions of their era: the faceless foreignness of the steppe, the memory of Batu, the shadow of Tamerlane, the echoes of Turkish wars. The myth didn't need a specific person, it needed a name. And Chelubey was simply lucky to be born in the era of the printing press: therefore, of all the enemy's names, it was he who settled in school textbooks and on the wall with Avilov's reproduction.
Information