GERMAN INVASION--MONGOL INVASION
The Principality of Novgorod had from a remote antiquity been the
political center of Northern, as was Kief of Southern Russia. It was
the Novgorodians who invited the Norse Princes to come and rule the
land; and it was the Novgorodians who were their least submissive
subjects. When one of the Grand Princes proposed to send his son, whom
they did not want, to be their Prince, they replied: "Send him here if
he has a spare head." It was a fearless, proud republic, as patriotic
and as quarrelsome as Florence, which it somewhat resembled. Their
Prince was in reality a figurehead. He was considered essential to the
dignity of the state, but his fortunes were in the hands of two
political parties, of which he represented the party in the ascendant.
Novgorod was a commercial city--its life was in its trade with the
Orient and the Greek Empire, and like the Italian cities, its politics
were swayed by economic interests. Those in trade with the East
through the Volga desired a Prince from one of the great families about
that Oriental artery in the Southeast; while those whose fortunes
depended upon the Greeks preferred one from Kief or the principalities
on the Dnieper. When one party fell, the Prince fell with it, and as
the formula expressed it, they then "made him a reverence, and showed
him the way out of Novgorod"--or else held him captive until his
successor arrived.
Princes might come, and Princes might go, but an irrepressible spirit
of freedom "went on forever"; the reigns all too short and troubled to
disturb the ancient liberties and customs of the republic. No Grand
Prince was ever powerful enough to impose upon them a Prince they did
not want, and no Prince strong enough to oppose the will of the people;
every act of his requiring the sanction of their _posadnik_, a high
official--and every decision subject to reversal by the _Vetché_, the
popular assembly. The _Vetché_ was, in fact, the real sovereign of the
proud republic which styled itself, "My Lord Novgorod the Great." Such
was the remarkable state which played an important, and certainly the
most picturesque, part in the history of Russia.
The first thought of the new Grand Prince at Suzdal was to prevent the
possible rivalry of this arrogant principality in the North, by
conquering it and breaking its spirit. He was also resolved to break
thoroughly with the past, to destroy the system of Appanages, and had
conceived the idea of the modern undivided state. He removed his
capital from the old town of Suzdal, which had its _Vetché_ or popular
assembly, to Vladimir, which had had none of these things, assigning as
his reason, not that he intended to be sole master and free from all
ancient trammels--but that the Mother of God had come to him in a dream
and commanded him so to do! But an end came to all his dreams and
ambitions. He was assassinated in 1174 by his own _boyars_, who were
exasperated by his subversive policy and suspicions of his daring
reforms.
With the setting of the currents of Russian national life toward the
North, there was awakened in Europe a vague sense of danger. Not far
from Novgorod, on and about the shores of the Baltic, were various
tributary Slav tribes, mingled with pagan Finns. This was the only
point of actual contact, the only point without natural protection
between Russia and Europe, and it must be guarded. German merchants,
hand in hand with Latin missionaries, invaded a strip of disputed
territory, and, under the cloak of Christianity, commenced
a--_conquest_. A Latin Church became also a fortress; and the fortress
soon expanded into a German town, and these crept every year farther
and farther into the East. In order to quell the resistance of native
Finns and Slavs, there was created, and authorized by the Pope, an
order of knighthood, called the "Sword-Bearers," with the double
purpose of driving back the Slavonic tide which threatened Germany and
at the same time Christianizing it. These were the "Livonian Knights,"
who came from Saxony and Westphalia, armed _cap-à-pie_, with red
crosses embroidered upon the shoulder of their white mantles. Then
another order was created (1225), the "Teutonic Order," wearing black
crosses on their shoulders, which, after fraternizing with the Livonian
Knights, was going to absorb them--together with some other
things--into their own more powerful organization. Russia had no armed
warriors to meet these steel-clad Germans and Livonians. She had no
orders of chivalry, had taken no part in the Crusades, the far-off
echoes of which had fallen upon unheeding ears. The Russians could
defend with desperate courage their own flimsy fortifications of wood,
earth, and loose stones; but they could not pull down with ropes the
solid German fortresses of stone and cement, and their spears were
ineffectual upon the shining armor. Their conquest was inevitable; the
conquered territory being divided between the knights and the Latin
Church. So Königsberg and many other Russian towns were captured and
then Teutonized, by joining them to the cities of Lubeck, Bremen,
Hamburg, etc., in the "Hanseatic League."
This conquest was of less future importance to Russia than to Western
Europe. It contained the germ of much history. The territory thus
wrested from Russia became the German state of Prussia; and a future
master of the Teutonic order, a Hohenzollern, was in later years its
first King; and this was the beginning of the great German Empire which
confronts the Empire of the Czar to-day.
So the conquest by the German Orders was added to the other woes by
which Russia was rent and torn after the death of her Grand Prince at
Suzdal. To us it all seems like an unmeaning panorama of chaos and
disorder. But to them it was only the vicissitudes naturally occurring
in the life of a great nation. They were proud of their nationality,
which had existed nearly as long as from Columbus to our own day. They
gloried in their splendid background of great deeds and their long line
of heroes reaching back to Rurik. Their Princes were proud and
powerful--their followers (the _Drujiniki_)--noble and fearless--who
could stand before them? They would have exchanged their glories for
those of no nation upon the earth, except perhaps that waning empire of
the Caesars at Constantinople!
Such was the sentiment of Russian nationality at the time when its
overwhelming humiliation suddenly came, a degrading subjection to
Asiatic Mongols, which lasted 250 years.
In the year 1224 there appeared in the Southeast a strange host who
claimed the land of the Polovtsui, a Tatar clan which had been for
centuries encamped about the Sea of Azof. The Russian chronicler
naively says: "There came upon us for our sins unknown nations. God
alone knew who they were, or where they came from--God, and perhaps
wise men, learned in books"--which it is evident the chronicler was
not! The invaders were Mongols--that branch of the human family from
which had come the Tatars and the Huns, already familiar to Russia.
But these Mongols were the vanguard of a vast army which had streamed
like a torrent through the heart of Asia, conquering as it came;
gathering one after another the Asiatic kingdoms into an empire ruled
by Genghis Khan, a sovereign who in forty years had made himself master
of China and the greater part of Asia--saying: "As there is only one
Sun in Heaven, so there should be only one Emperor on the Earth"; and
when he died, in 1227, he left the largest empire that had ever
existed, and one which he was preparing to extend into Western Europe.
It was the court of this great sovereign which, in 1275, was visited by
the Venetian traveler Marco Polo. This was the far-off Cathay,
descriptions of which fired the imagination of Europe, and awoke a
consuming desire to get access to its fabulous riches, and which two
centuries later filled the mind of Columbus with dreams of reaching
that land of wonders by way of the West.
The Polovtsui appealed to the nearest principalities for help, offering
to adopt their religion and to become their subjects, in return for
aid. When several Princes came with their armies to the rescue, the
Mongols sent messengers saying: "We have no quarrel with you; we have
come to destroy the accursed Polovtsui." The Princes replied by
promptly putting the ambassadors all to death. This sealed the fate of
Russia. There could be no compromise after that. Upon that first
battlefield, on the steppes near the sea of Azof, there were left six
Princes, seventy chief _boyars_, and all but one-tenth of the Russian
army.
After this thunderbolt had fallen an ominous quiet reigned for thirteen
years. Nothing more was heard of the Mongols--but a comet blazing in
the sky awoke vague fears. Suddenly an army of five hundred thousand
Asiatics returned, led by Batui, nephew of the Great Khan of Khans.
It was the defective political structure of Russia, its division into
principalities, which made it an easy prey. The Mongols, moving as one
man, took one principality at a time, its nobles and citizens alone
bearing arms, the peasants, by far the greater part, being utterly
defenseless. After wrecking and devastating that, they passed on to
the next, which, however desperately defended, met the same fate. The
Grand Principality was a ruin; its fourteen towns were burned, and
when, in the absence of its Grand Prince, Vladimir the capital city
fell, the Princesses and all the families of the nobles took refuge in
the cathedral and perished in the general conflagration (1238). Two
years later Kief also fell, with its white walls and towers embellished
by Byzantine art, its cupolas of gold and silver. All was laid in the
dust, and only a few fragments in museums now remain to tell of its
glory. The annalist describes the bellowings of the buffaloes, the
cries of the camels, the neighing of the horses, and howlings of the
Tatars while the ancient and beautiful city was being laid low.
Before 1240 the work was complete. There was a Mongol empire where had
been a Russian. Then the tide began to set toward Western Europe.
Isolated from the other European states by her religion, Russia had
suffered alone. No Europe sprang to her defense as to the defense of
Spain from the Saracens. Not until Poland and Hungary were threatened
and invaded did the Western Kingdoms give any sign of interest. Then
the Pope, in alarm, appealed to the Christian states. Frederick II. of
Germany responded, and Louis IX. of France (Saint-Louis) prepared to
lead a crusade. But the storm had spent its fury upon the Slavonic
people, and was content to pause upon those plains which to the Asiatic
seemed not unlike his own home.