Grand Duke Dmitri of Moscow loosened the grip of the Tartar Horde on the people of Russia, but treachery robbed him of triumph.
The tale of St Dmitri of the Don is a tale of the quest to free a people from foreign domination, of hard-fought victory and of wholly avoidable defeat. In 1380, Grand Duke Dmitri I of Moscow, aged just twenty-nine, freed the city from generations of vassalage to the Tartar Golden Horde, only for treachery to bring all that he had achieved to nothing in the very hour of triumph.