The Russian principalities, weakened by civil wars, had no time for
federation or concentration against the race that, moving with the
swiftness of wild horses, darkened the horizon of the realm with
their coming in 1224. Their aspect was rude, gross, and frightful:
collectively, they were like an army of goblins. An English writer, who
had perhaps witnessed one of their attacks, describes them: “They have
broad and flat visages of a tanned color, yellow and black; thin hayre
upon the upper lip, and a pit upon the chin. Their speeche is sudden
and loud, speaking as if out of a deep hollow throat. When they sing,
you would think a cow lowed, or a great Ban dog howled. They suffer
not their children to eat till they have shot near the Marke, within
a certain scantling.” The bellowing of their cattle, the neighing of
their wild horses, the grinding of the wooden wheels of their wagons,
heightened the din and terror of their approach. In appearance and in
warfare they were, in effect, half a million maniacs, mounted on horses
as frenzied as themselves. Such conception of government as they had,
took form in companies or hordes, who lived together in consenting
communities, guarded by hosts of mounted archers. The poet, Matthew
Arnold, in “Sohrab and Rustum,” gives a vivid enumeration of a Tatar
host, as it mustered “by the broad-flowing Oxus,” many centuries prior
to the period whereof we write:
“Kalmucks and Kuzzaks, tribes who stray
Nearest the pole; and wandering Kirghizes,
Who come on shaggy ponies from Pamere:[B]
* * * * *
The Tatars of the Oxus, the king’s guard,
First, with black sheepskin caps, and with long spears;
Large men, large steeds, who from Bokhara come,
And Khiva, and ferment the milk of mares.
Next, the more temperate Toorkums of the south,
The Tukas, and the lances of Salore,
And those from Attruck, and the Caspian sands—
Light men, and on light steeds, who only drink
The acrid milk of camels, and their wells.
And then a swarm of wandering horse, who come
From far, and a more doubtful service owned—
The Tatars of Ferghana, from the banks
Of the Jaxartes—men with scanty beards,
And close-set skull-caps; and those wilder hordes
Who roam o’er Kipschak and the northern waste.”
The lieutenants of Genghis, Tchep and Subudaï-bagadur, leaders of the
invasion, fell upon the princes successively, cut down their small
armies, struck terror into the remoter regions of the realm by the
renown of the Asiatic conquests, and by the well-nigh incredible
devastations made on Russian soil. The report was bruited that the
Tatars had closed with the Polovtsui in southeastern Russia. These
sent messengers imploring help from the descendants of Vladimir,
saying: “The Tatars have taken our country; to-morrow they will take
yours.” Scarcely had Mstislaf the Bold, in Galitsch, son of Mstislaf
the Brave,[C] summoned Daniel of Volhynia, Mstislaf Romanovitch of
Kief, and the other leading princes of the south to arm for the common
cause, when the Tatar scouts had wet their horses’ hoofs in the Lower
Dnieper. By the Kalka, a small stream coursing to the Sea of Azof, the
brave, incautious Russian chivalry came within view of the innumerable
mounted barbarians, moving with the speed and the obedience of one man.
Mstislaf the Bold, Daniel of Volhynia, and Oleg of Kursk, precipitously
urged by their angry contempt of the wild pagans, and by their
eagerness to seize the honors of victory, closed with the dark swarms.
In the height of battle, the Polovtsui, seized with affright, fell back
disorderly upon the Russian ranks, causing disturbance and discomfiture
throughout the army. The strange, wild sounds of the foe, the dust and
clouds of arrows, added to the confusion, and soon the rout became
general. The soldiers fled in terror from horsemen, the like of whom
they had never seen, not even among the Petchenegs or the Drevliané;
and for the princes nothing remained but instantaneous death, or flight
to the Dnieper. Six of them already lay stiff and stark upon the field,
amid seventy of their chief boyars, and nine-tenths of the fighting
force; for of the one hundred thousand Russians, barely ten thousand
escaped alive from the banks of the Kalka. Mstislaf Romanovitch of
Kief had not been apprised of the rash advance of the three Princes,
and consequently had remained within his earth-works on the bank of
the Kalka. Abandoned by the fleeing remnant of the Russian host, he
maintained a show of self-defense, until the Tatars made proposals
permitting him to retire without molestation, on condition that ransom
were paid for himself and his drujina; a condition violated as soon as
it was accepted. The drujina were cut down by the sword; the prince
with his two sons-in-law was stifled between planks. This day of
national ruin closed with a festival held by the invaders over their
slain victims.
The realm was silent with terror. Mourning for the fallen brave,
burial of the dead, universal dismay followed this onslaught, that had
been so sudden, so overwhelming, as to overpower any resolution for
further defense. All at once, without notification, the multitudes
of the Tatars vanished as swiftly and as mysteriously as they had
appeared. One would have said their horses had invisible wings. They
had crossed the Ural River, and were reported as beyond the Caspian
Sea. They had returned to their late conquered lands of the East,
where they remained during thirteen years, strengthening their hold,
increasing in boldness, and ever and anon invading China with their
cloud-like hordes. The Princes reverted to their usual discords,
the Mongols gradually ceased to be talked of, save as a frightful
apparition that had disappeared as unaccountably as it had advanced.
Yet the sagacious and the learned among the Russians were not without
forebodings. A comet had traversed the heavens in 1224, prior to the
devouring invasion. Its re-appearance was regarded as a warning, an
_avant-courier_ of the Tatars. The chroniclers record with alarm the
seasons of scarcity and of pestilence, the conflagrations of towns, and
especially the earthquake and sun eclipse of 1230, as portentous omens
for the imperiled realm.
In 1237 the nomads who traversed the lands long before occupied by the
Bulgarians of the Volga,[D] gave notice of a second irruption of the
Mongol hosts, in a line of approach toward Suzdalian Russia. Forthwith
followed tidings of the destruction of the “Great City,” capital of the
half-civilized Bulgarui, and the massacre of all, or nearly all, of the
people of that region. The invaders, led by Batui, nephew of Genghis,
plunged into the forests of the Volga, and sent forward to Riazan two
envoys with a sorcerer or Shaman. “If you want peace give us a tribute
of the tenth of your goods,” ran their message. The ancient Slav
courage and quickness that had spurred the Princes by the Kalka, was
still regnant; and Riazan, with the neighboring States, represented in
all by seven Princes, made answer: “When we are dead you may have the
whole, if you can get them.” But, as before, the rude, wild race laid
low the bravery of the nobler one. The Russian soldiers were cut down,
till scarce any were left to tell the story of the day of ruin. Feodor,
one of the fair youth of the Russian chivalry, as he lay bleeding on
the field, exclaimed: “I thank thee, Great God, that thou takest me now
to thyself. Mine eyes shall not behold Euphrasia the spoil of Batui.”
Euphrasia, his beautiful wife, learning his fate, and forecasting her
own, leaped from her castle window, her infant boy in her arms, crying:
“Receive me, Christ and Feodor! Me, the hunted prey of the savage!”
Oleg the Handsome, found bleeding from many wounds, among his dead
drujina, repelled the offers, the caresses of the Khan, and was hewn
into fragments. The ancient capital, the whole principality of Riazan
was laid waste with sword and fire.
The stronger powers of Tchernigof and Suzdal had stood aloof in this
unequal conflict, but were speedily punished for their supineness.
Iuri (George) the Second, Grand Prince of Suzdal, and nephew of Andrei
Bogoliubski, was driven from the field of battle by his mounted foemen,
who also burned the young growing city of Moscow, and laid siege to the
ancient capital, Vladimir-on-the-Kliasma, left to the guard of Iuri’s
sons, while he went northward in search of help. The citizens prepared
for their fate. Their bishop, Metrophanes, invested the princes and
the boyars with the tonsure and the monastic garb: for the ancient
custom of Russian royalty and nobility is to go down to death thus
habited, symbolizing a formal renunciation of and separation from the
world. When the Mongols, breaking in at all the gates simultaneously,
swarmed into the revered capital, their first act was to burn the
cathedral, whither had taken refuge the family of Iuri, with all the
wealthy and powerful of the principality. Amid the crackling of the
conflagration, the falling of timbers and roofs, the fierce war-cries
of the barbarians, the souls in the sanctuary passed to their eternal
destiny. The cities of Suzdal, Rostof, Iaroslavl, fourteen other large
towns, and nearly all the villages of the principality were destroyed
to the last house, and the last man, in this all-devouring campaign.
The Mongols went in search of Iuri, who was in the realm of Novgorod
raising recruits for his army. When he learned the fate of his capital,
he cried: “Alas, that I have lived to see this day! Why am I left of
all my people?” His headless body received burial at the hands of the
Bishop of Rostof. Vasilko, Iuri’s son, was of comely mien and gracious
manners. The Tatars, notwithstanding their ferocity and brutishness,
were susceptible to the charm of beauty, and certain among them spoke
gently to him: “Stay with us. You shall bear the banner of Batui. He
is worthy.” “Never will I put my hand to the banner of the foemen of
my country, and of the Lord Christ,” replied Vasilko. “Great as is my
woe, ye shall never force me to lift my hand against a Christian. Thy
destruction will also come, O heavy and cursed power! There _is_ a
God, and you are doomed to perdition. Thither will you be hurled, when
your cup is full, ye human tigers!” At these bold words, wrung from
an agonized, but noble Slavic heart, the barbarians “gnashed upon him
with their teeth,” thrust at him with their sabers, and flung his body
into the forest of Scherensk, whither it was rescued, in time, and laid
beside the remains of his father.
On their return route, the Tatars razed “Tver, the ancient and the
rich,” and Torjok, where “the Russian heads fell beneath the Tatar
swords as falls the grass before the scythe.” All traces of human
habitation and human life disappeared in the track of their wanderings;
for their cloud-like advances could not be called a march. The Great
Republic began to tremble, for they had passed within her frontier. But
swollen rivers, and forests till then untrodden by human feet, delayed
the host, who sought, moreover, a softer clime and booty more easily
obtained. It surged up to the Cross of Ignatius, within fifty miles
of Novgorod Veliki, and there turned to the southeast. The village of
Kozelsk (in the modern government of Kalouga), resisted to the death,
and caused severe loss to the attacking squadrons. They named it the
Wicked Town, and left not one of its people alive. Its young prince,
Vasili, was drowned in a pool of blood.
Pereiaslaf and Tchernigof, though defended with similar desperation,
suffered the same destruction (1238). All Russia, save the principality
of Kief, was red with the blood of her children, or marred by the
conflagrations kindled by the Asiatics. Mangu, grandson of Genghis,
coveted the city whose praises had been uttered ofttimes by travelers
and merchants in the Orient. From the left bank of the Dnieper he gazed
upon its walls of hewn stone, its springing towers, its many-domed
churches, roofed with silver and gold. Such a city in such a sunlight,
not even a Tatar could despise. Could it but be preserved intact, a
trophy of the conquest, it might well serve as a capital, a center for
the incoming conquering race. Messengers were sent across the river,
offering what the chief considered doubtless as fair conditions of
surrender. But though Riazan, Vladimir, Tchernigof, Tver, venerable
capitals of powerful states, had been burned to ashes, the indomitable
Slavic heart would
[Illustration: [_Map showing the position of the tribes formerly
inhabiting Russia._]] not endure the thought of servitude. The Kievans
trampled the envoys under foot, and awaited their own fate. Mikhail the
Prince, with Daniel of Galitsch, and the Prince of Volhynia took refuge
in Poland and Hungary. Dmitri, deputy of Daniel, led the citizens in
defending the Polish Gate, the attacking point of the enemy. Batui
brought up its main body with an uproar that seemed to cause the earth
to quake; the grinding of the wooden chariots, the cries of the camels,
the neighing of wild horses, the war shrieks of the Tatars, the plying
of their rude rams, united in such a confused turmoil as drowned
the voices of those within the walls. Scarcely could the commands
of Dmitri be understood. He with his Kievans, however, stood in the
breach till sundown. The next day they retreated to the enclosure
palisaded around the Church of the Tithe, defending their shrine as men
defend their altars when their last hour has come. The greater part of
them perished, write the chroniclers, around the tomb of their great
Iaroslaf; the khan, however, commanded that Dmitri’s life should be
spared; he would not see so noble a foeman ignominiously cut down. The
city was then given over to the fury of the Asiatics. The venerable
Church of the Tithe was so far destroyed that nothing remains of it, at
present, save a few fragments of mosaic, preserved in the museum of the
modern town. The Monastery of the Catacombs, founded by Saint Antony
from Mt. Athos, where the saints lived and died in tombs of their own
construction, was violated; no spot more redolent of sanctity, more
revered than this, exists in the vast Russian Empire.[E] The splendor
of the ancient Slav capital, fatally obscured by this second and most
ruinous violation, has never been recovered. Kief has never thoroughly
shaken from her garments the ashes of the Tatar brands.
The great states of Volhynia and Gallicia, abandoned by their princes,
were in no condition for a resolute resistance, after the ruin of the
rest of the realm. They bent themselves to the Mongol yoke, which had
now been imposed upon all Russia outside the Great Republic. Those of
the people who had escaped the Tatar arrows, were made slaves. The
wives of boyars who had been surrounded with luxury, clothed in costly
stuffs from the Orient, adorned with jewels and with golden collars,
became the menials of the rude and filthy Tatars, were forced to cook
their mutton and grain, and to grind their mills.
When the Princes of Galitsch, Volhynia, and Kief reached Western
Europe, the nations were greatly moved. Louis IX. prepared for a
crusade. Friedrich Second, Emperor of Germany, wrote to the other
sovereigns: “This is a moment to open the eyes of all men, now that
the gallant princes on whom we counted are enslaved or slaughtered.”
Meanwhile the Mongols, ever wandering, impelled by the assertion of the
great Genghis, that all the earth should become subject to one emperor,
passed westward to the hills of Hungary, and were met by a Polish host
at Liegnitz in Silesia. Their advance was strongly contested at Olmütz,
in Moravia, where the Tchek voïvode, Iaroslaf, conducted a stubborn
defense; nor did they pass eastward of this strongly fortified place:
for learning there from the west that the King of Bohemia, allied with
the Dukes of Austria and Karinthia, was coming with a mighty host to
confront them: learning too, from the east, of the death of Oktai,
successor of Genghis, Batui turned his horses’ heads, and made his way
back to the Caspian, his force greatly diminished by the dense and
hostile population of the hill region of Silesia, and by the continual
molestation of a well-trained Polish cavalry, alert and well-prepared.
It was the Slavic peoples,—the Russians, Poles, Silesians, and
Moravians,—who bore the shock, and suffered the terrors of this last of
the great Asiatic incursions. A few heroic Europeans on the outskirts
of European civilization, sent backward the last tidal wave of barbaric
invasion.
Upon the European steppes, apparently extensions of the Asiatic plains,
beside a branch of the Lower Volga, Batui paused to build a “castle,”
or city, Saraï, that became in time the capital of the Russian Tatar
empire, the Golden Horde—so called from its sending a tent made of
cloth of gold to the Grand Khan in Asia, as a part of its annual
tribute; or perhaps from the chief tent of Batui, which was made of
this precious stuff. This empire, called also Kipschak, extended from
the Ural River and the Caspian Sea, westward to the mouth of the
Danube, seventeen hundred miles; and from north to south, above a
thousand miles, covering an area of one million seven hundred thousand
square miles, or about half the area of our republic. Here gathered
the Tatar Mongols, or modern Nogais, the remnants of the Petchenegs
and the Polovtsui (Kumans), the Bashkirs, and later the Kalmucks, with
various Turkish nomad tribes, such as the Tatars of Astrakan, and the
aboriginal Finnish populations,—all save the last named invaders of the
Russian realm from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries. The Golden
Horde remained tributary to the first three successors of Genghis,
but revolted from the fourth, Khubulaï, conqueror of the Chinese, and
announced itself an independent empire in 1260. United and strong
under the firm reign of Batui, it fell into dismemberment under his
successors, till Khan Uzbek, in the fourteenth century, restored its
unity and its primal prosperity. Gradually the nomads who settled upon
its vast plains accepted the faith of Islam, and enrolled themselves
among its fiercest propagandists. Gradually, too, they adopted
partially the civilization of the people they had enslaved. The modern
Russian Tatar is mild, peaceable, industrious, has a keen eye to trade,
and unless in military ranks, cares nothing for warfare. But the advent
of his race ushered a night of gloom over the young empire. All its
arts and industries were annihilated for a century or more; its people
were massacred or enslaved, its governments shattered, its national
growth hopelessly obstructed. Its original Orientalism was intensified
and used as the groundwork for the uprearing of an Oriental barbarism.
The fine sensibilities, the poetry and grace, the generous spirit and
gentle, hospitable manners of the Slav, were inoculated and depraved by
the cruelty, the contempt of life, the falsehood, treachery, perfidy,
and filthiness of the Mongol barbarians. One of the laws of Genghis
was that clothes must never be washed, but worn without washing till
they decayed. A like prohibition extended to the cooking utensils. The
virtues and vices of his race have been enumerated as those of the
animals of their zodiac:
Thievish as mice,
Strong as oxen,
Ferocious as panthers,
Cautious as hares,
Subtle as serpents,
Horrible as dragons,
Mettlesome as horses,
Obedient (to their rulers) as sheep,
Child-loving (of their offspring) as apes,
Faithful (to their over-lord) as dogs,
Unclean as swine.
Their ferocity led to the report in Greece and Western Europe that
they had dog’s heads, and lived on human flesh. The degeneracy of
the ancient Slav began with the entrance of the horsemen of Tchep
and Subudaï-bagadur into the Russian realm. In the modern Russian,
compounded of Finn, Turk, Tatar, and German, scarcely a trace of the
nobler Slav lineaments is evident; and from the fourteenth century the
current maxim gains continually in veracity: “Scratch a Russian and you
find a Tatar.”
[To be continued.]