In the winter of 1240, the Golden Horde under Batu Khan had already burned Moscow, flattened Vladimir, and reduced Kiev to ash. The Mongol advance seemed unstoppable, as it had been for a generation across the steppe and into the lands of the Rus. But in a narrow, frozen gap known as the Kolodny Pass, a Mongol vanguard of roughly 10,000 men encountered something they were not prepared for: a shield wall of about 100 exiles, the remnants of the Varangian Guard, standing firm in the snow. These were Norsemen who had once served as the emperor’s own guard in Constantinople and as elite axemen for princes in Kiev.
With no emperor left to serve and no wages to collect, they had taken a stand in a pass no one had asked them to hold. Their leader, a giant of nearly two meters called Bjorn, understood the terrain. He chose the narrowest point in the corridor, keeping the low winter sun at his back, so that the full weight of the Mongol numbers could never be brought to bear at once. When the Mongols charged, their horse archers darkened the sky with arrows.
The Varangians locked their tall kite shields and held their ground. Horses refused to charge the wall of wood and iron, and the attackers collapsed into chaos in front of the Norse line. Bjorn rotated his ranks, replacing tired men with fresh ones, and the killing went on. The dead began to stack into a rampart that blocked the Mongols’ own advance, and the pass filled with the bodies of horses and men.
After the first day, the Mongols brought up siege engines. They hurled pots of burning naphtha and oil into the pass, setting many of the defenders alight. Despite the fiery assault, the survivors held the line rather than break formation. The Mongol commander then sent in heavy infantry, but Bjorn used the night’s cold to his advantage.
Melted ice had refrozen into black glass, and the Norse, with iron studs in their boots, could hold their footing while the enemy slid and fell. A champion of the Khan’s own guard, the Kheshig, stepped forward to challenge Bjorn to single combat. The duel left Bjorn with broken ribs, but he brought the giant down with a low strike and drove a knife through the seam in his armor. In the final assault, only a few dozen Varangians remained able to fight.
Bjorn ordered the survivors into a ring formation and told them to die on their feet. When the fight broke into single men against the tide, Bjorn was cornered. The Mongols, refusing to touch him hand to hand, ordered archers to shoot him down. Twelve arrows struck his chest.
He remained standing for a moment, then pitched forward onto the wall of the dead. The Golden Horde marched on but never forgot the pass. They took Kiev that December, and later burned Krakow and shattered the Hungarian army at Mohi. Europe lay open before them, their conquest seemingly complete.
But late in 1241, the Great Khan Ögedei died in Karakorum. The princes had to ride home to elect a new khan, and Batu Khan turned the horde around within sight of the Austrian frontier. Europe never learned how close it had come to total conquest.
Historians note that no field army could stand against the Mongols from the Vistula to the Adriatic, but the three days spent at the Kolodny Pass had bought time, and the story of the standing dead man of the west survived for decades in the yurts of the steppe.