Northern Estonia in the thirteenth century was a contested fault line. To the west and south, the Livonian Order — German military monks who had absorbed the older Sword Brothers and were now masters of much of modern Latvia and southern Estonia — pushed their crusading frontier eastward. The Bishopric of Dorpat, ruled by a German prelate, controlled the country around modern Tartu. To the north, the Kingdom of Denmark held Vironia and what is today Tallinn (then Reval) as Danish Estonia, a colonial possession across the sea. To the east of all of this, the Republic of Novgorod and its sister city Pskov ran an enormous Orthodox Russian trading state. The local Estonians — the chronicles call them Chuds — were the people whose land it was, fought over by everyone.

In 1267, a Novgorodian army marched south, supposedly toward the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. As they crossed the Pskov region, the plan changed. Instead they turned northwest, into Danish Estonia, looking to raid Wesenberg — the modern Estonian town of Rakvere. The expedition the following year was larger and more deliberate. Russian princes from across the northeast pulled their retinues together: Dmitry of Pereslavl, Daumantas of Pskov (himself a Lithuanian-born convert to Orthodoxy), Yury of Suzdal, and others. They crossed the Narva River and moved into the country around Rakvere, looting villages as they came. According to the Chronicle of Novgorod, somewhere in the chase they discovered a great cave full of Estonians hiding from the army. For three days the Russians could not get at them. Finally they channeled water into the cave, forcing the people inside to flee — and many were cut down as they came out. It is one of those small atrocities the chronicles record almost in passing, easy to read past, hard to forget once noticed.

The Russians did not take Rakvere. The Livonian Knights, the Bishop of Dorpat's troops, and the Danes met them on the Kegola River with an army that contemporary chroniclers describe as advancing in a great wedge — the classic German keilförmiger Schar formation, armored knights at the point, infantry filling out behind. The Russians crossed the river without delay and arrayed their lines, with the Pskovians on one flank, Dmitry's men higher up the slope, and the bulk of the Novgorodian troops in the center. The Novgorodian First Chronicle lists the names of boyars killed in the fighting — many of them — and admits that the prince Yury fled the field. But it also says the Germans were eventually pushed back and pursued nearly to the walls of Wesenberg. A second German wedge meanwhile attacked the Russian baggage train. By nightfall the two armies stood facing each other across a short stretch of field, exhausted. Before the sun came up, the chronicle says, the Germans slipped away.

Modern historians lean toward the Livonian account, mostly because of what happened next. The Novgorodian-Pskovian army withdrew from Danish Estonia rather than pressing on. The Livonian Order, instead of negotiating from a position of weakness, launched a retaliatory campaign of their own in June 1269, attacking Izborsk and besieging Pskov. Neither move suggests a victorious Russian army on the field. But the Livonian losses must also have been heavy, since they made peace with Novgorod soon after. Over the next two decades, Novgorod expanded its dominance over the Votic peoples to the north — quietly, without further open battles in Estonia. Catholic Europe meanwhile continued to view Russian territorial gains as illegitimate. In 1301, Pope Boniface VIII lifted the interdict that had been imposed on northern Danish Estonia, complaining that it was 'surrounded by Russians, Karelians, Izhorians, Votians and Lithuanians' encouraging local Estonians to fall away from the Catholic Church.

Rakvere is now a small town of about fifteen thousand in Lääne-Viru County, northern Estonia, an hour and a half east of Tallinn by road. Its medieval order castle still rises on a green hill above the town, its walls and towers partly ruined and partly restored, with reenactors and small museums in summer. From above, the country around Rakvere is the classic landscape of north-central Estonia — open glacial plains broken by patches of forest, with the long blue line of the Gulf of Finland visible to the north on clear days. The Kegola is a modest stream running through farmland; nothing about it suggests that a thousand armored men once stood on its banks waiting for the morning, and that some of them did not get to see it.