epochs in the history of the country over which he reigned, since from
him the nobles obtained their Golden Bull (_Bulla Aurea_), equivalent
to the Magna Charta of England. The people of Hungary had, indeed, by
their own determination and spirit of independence, and by the wisdom
and virtue of the first kings of the race of Arpad, secured in their
constitution the foundation of their liberties; but the power of the
sovereign had in the mean time increased, so as to surpass those
limits within which alone the office can be conducive to the happiness
and welfare of the community. The ceremony of coronation was
considered, indeed, a necessary condition for the exercise of the
royal authority; but though this in some measure acted as a check upon
his inordinate power, still all offices and dignities were in the gift
of the King, few, if any, being hereditary, and even the magnates
could not prevent the monarch giving away any part of his dominions.
Wars with Russia and Poland occupied the first years after the
accession of Andrew, and much discontent was occasioned in the country
by the imperious character of Gertrude his Queen, who ruled over her
husband, and caused her relatives and friends to be raised to the
highest places in the State. The marriage of the young princess
Elizabeth to Louis, son of the Landgrave of Thuringia, was solemnized
with great pomp at Presburg, in 1212. The period of prosperity to
Hungary which had followed the birth of this child made the people
look upon her as one favored by heaven, and her singular virtues
helped to confirm the superstition; her life has formed the groundwork
of one of the most beautiful of saintly legends, and after her death
she was canonized as St. Elizabeth of Hungary.
At her nuptials, Queen Gertrude, assuming the authority of her
husband, not only presented the ambassadors of the Landgrave with rich
presents of gold, silver, and jewels, but bid them tell their lord
that if a long life were granted to her she would send them still
greater wealth. The following year Andrew accompanied his son Coloman
into Poland, to celebrate his marriage with a daughter of the duke,
and intrusted the regency during his absence to Gertrude and her
relations. Time and opportunity favored a conspiracy against the
imperious Queen, and the first attack was made on her brother, the
Archbishop of Colocza. He, however, escaped with his life, and in
revenge he induced the Pope (Honorius) to lay Hungary under an
interdict.
The people, however, showed small regard for the denunciations of a
distant pontiff, and, irritated by fresh offences, committed by
brothers of the Queen, in which Gertrude herself appears to have
participated, they murdered her in her own palace, and her children
only escaped by the care and fidelity of their tutor. Their uncles
fled from the country, carrying with them a large amount of treasure
collected by Andrew, who bitterly complained of their ingratitude in a
letter to the holy see.
The King shortly afterward married the daughter of Peter of Courtenay,
Count of Auxerre, and made a vow to raise another crusade. The Latin
Emperor of Constantinople dying about this time, the choice of a
successor lay between the Hungarian King and his new father-in-law. It
fell upon Andrew, and he was invited to take possession of the
imperial crown, but was dissuaded from accepting the honor by Pope
Honorius, who had already crowned Peter emperor of the East. Peter was
opposed by Theodore Comnenus, by whom he was arrested and thrown into
a dungeon. The Pope appealed for assistance to Andrew, then on his way
to the Holy Land. Andrew accordingly proceeded to Acre, which he
reached after a long voyage, but his expedition partook more of a
pilgrimage than of a crusade. He was absent from Hungary four years,
and returned to find the whole kingdom in disorder, the treasury
emptied, and greedy prelates and magnates devouring the substance of
the people.
To replenish his treasury, Andrew appropriated the gold and jewels
left by the empress Constantia, whose death, which took place about
this time, prevented her establishing her claim. He further supplied
his own extravagance, by farming the taxes to Jews, deteriorating the
coin, mortgaging the domains belonging to the fortified castles, and
selling the crown lands to wealthy magnates.
His eldest son Bela had already gained the respect and affection of
the people by the firmness of his character and his love of justice;
and Andrew, jealous of his popularity, obliged him to fly the kingdom
and seek protection from Leopold, Duke of Austria. The King was,
however, at last persuaded to invite him to return, and, in order to
secure his throne, he established him at a distance from himself, in
the government of Croatia and Dalmatia. Two years later his younger
son Coloman took the place of Bela, who was intrusted with the
government of Transylvania and of all the country between the Theiss
and Aluta. With a weak monarch and an exhausted treasury, the land had
become the prey of barbarous invaders, and the disorders of the
kingdom had reached such a climax that the magnates resolved to appeal
to the mediation of the Pope.
Honorius commanded Andrew to restore the lands which he had parted
with in direct violation of his coronation oath, by which he had sworn
to preserve the integrity of the kingdom and the honor of the crown.
Bela now assembled the nobles and franklins of Hungary, and, supported
by them, demanded the restoration of the ancient constitution. The
ecclesiastics of Hungary, instigated by the Pope, offered to mediate a
peace between the King, who was supported by the great magnates, and
his son, who had the voice of the people. The condition of this peace
was the Golden Bull of Hungary, which was granted in the year 1222. It
was here enacted that, "As the liberties of the nobility, and of
certain other natives of these realms, founded by King Stephen the
Saint, have suffered great detriment and curtailment by the violence
of sundry kings impelled by their own evil propensities, by the
cravings of their insatiable cupidity and by the advice of certain
malicious persons, and as the 'nobiles' of the country had preferred
frequent petitions for the confirmation of the constitution of these
realms; so that, in utter contempt of the royal authority, violent
discussions and accusations had arisen, ... the King declares he is
now willing to confirm and maintain, for all times to come, the
nobility and freemen of the country in all their rights, privileges,
and immunities, as provided by the statutes of St. Stephen."
1. "That the 'nobiles' and their possessions shall not, for the
future, be subject to taxes and impositions.
2. "That no man shall be either accused or arrested, sentenced or
punished for a crime, unless he receive a legal summons, and until a
judicial inquiry into his case shall have taken place.
3. "That though the 'nobiles' and franklins shall be bound to do
military service at their own expense, it shall not be legal to force
them to cross the frontier of their country. In a foreign war, the
king shall be bound to pay the knights and the troops of the counties.
4. "The king has no right to entail whole counties and the high
offices of the kingdom.
5. "The king is not allowed to farm to Jews and Ishmaelites his
domains, the taxes, the coinage, or the salt mines."
The Golden Bull comprised thirty-one chapters, and seven copies were
made and delivered into the keeping of the Knights of St. John, the
Knights Templars of Hungary and Slavonia, the King, the Palatine, the
archbishops of Gran and Colocza, and the Pope. The thirty-first clause
gave every Hungarian noble a right of veto upon the acts of the king
if unconstitutional. This clause was, however, supposed to give an
undue power to the people, and was revoked in 1687.
Those magnates who, by the Golden Bull, were compelled to return the
land unjustly alienated by King Andrew, formed a conspiracy to
overthrow the monarchy, abolish the constitution, and divide the land
among themselves. The conspiracy was discovered in time to prevent its
execution, but Andrew lost courage and did not venture to insist on
his refractory nobles fulfilling their part in the conditions of the
Great Charter. He was, however, compelled to ratify it in a diet held
in Beregher Forest, in 1231, where the Golden Bull was signed and
sealed with all solemnity in the city of Gran.
Andrew married for a third time in his old age, Beatrice, daughter of
the Marquis d'Este, and died in 1234. During his reign the court was
first held at a fixed place of residence; it was not only composed of
prelates and magnates, but was frequented by learned men, educated at
the schools of Paris and Bologna, as well as within the kingdom. The
cities acquired importance about this period, and the condition of the
serfs underwent some amelioration.
RUSSIA CONQUERED BY THE TARTAR HORDES
ALEXANDER NEVSKI SAVES THE REMNANT OF HIS PEOPLE
A.D. 1224-1262
ALFRED RAMBAUD
Russia was for centuries the chief power of the Slavic race.
On its plains and amid the neighboring lands they
established a civilization and went through a development
not unlike those which transformed Western Europe during the
Middle Ages. Slavonia, like Gaul, had received Roman
civilization and Christianity from the South. The Northmen
had brought her an organization which recalls that of the
Germans; and under Yaroslaff, 1016-1054, like the West under
Charlemagne, she had enjoyed a certain semblance of unity,
while she was afterward dismembered and divided like France
in feudal times.
The Tartars seem to have been a tribe of the great Mongol
race. They conquered Northern China and Central Asia, and
after forty years of struggle were united with other Mongol
tribes into one nation by Genghis Khan. His lieutenants
subdued a multitude of Turkish peoples, passed the Caspian
Sea by its southern shore, invaded Georgia and the Caucasus,
and entered upon the southern steppes of Russia, where they
came in contact with the Polovtsi, also a Mongol race, the
hereditary enemies of the Russians proper.
This summary by the distinguished French academician, M.
Rambaud--our leading authority in Russian history with its
related studies--presents, with sufficient clearness, the
character and tendency of Russia in the thirteenth century,
when she was invaded and subjugated by Asiatic hordes.
The Polovtsi asked the Christian princes for help against the Mongols
and Turks, who were their brothers by a common origin. "They have
taken our country," said they to the descendants of St. Vladimir;
"to-morrow they will take yours." Mstislaf the Bold, then Prince of
Galitch, persuaded all the dynasties of Southern Russia to take up
arms against the Tartars: his nephew Daniel, Prince of Volhynia,
Mstislaf Romanovitch, Grand Prince of Kiev, Oleg of Kursk, Mstislaf of
Tchernigof, Vladimir of Smolensk, and Vsevolod, for a short time
Prince of Novgorod,[57] responded to his appeal.
To cement his alliance with the Russians, Basti, Khan of the Polovtsi,
embraced orthodoxy. The Russian army had already arrived on the Lower
Dnieper, when the Tartar ambassadors made their appearance. "We have
come, by God's command, against our slaves and grooms, the accursed
Polovtsi. Be at peace with us; we have no quarrel with you." The
Russians, with the promptitude and thoughtlessness that characterized
the men of that time, put the ambassadors to death. They then went
farther into the steppe, and encountered the Asiatic hordes on the
Kalka, a small river running into the Sea of Azov.
The Russian chivalry, on this memorable day, showed the same
disordered and the same ill-advised eagerness as the French chivalry
at the opening of the English wars. Mstislaf the Bold, Daniel of
Galitch, and Oleg of Kursk were the first to rush into the midst of
the infidels, without waiting for the princes of Kiev, and even
without giving them warning, in order to gain for themselves the
honors of victory. In the middle of the combat, the Polovtsi were
seized with a panic and fell back on the Russian ranks, thus throwing
them into disorder. The rout became general, and the leaders spurred
on their steeds in hopes of reaching the Dnieper.
Six princes and seventy of the chief boyars or _voievodes_ remained on
the field of battle. It was the Crécy and Poitiers of the Russian
chivalry. Hardly a tenth of the army escaped; the Kievians alone left
ten thousand dead. The Grand Prince of Kiev, however, Mstislaf
Romanovitch, still occupied a fortified camp on the banks of the
Kalka. Abandoned by the rest of the army, he tried to defend himself.
The Tartars offered to make terms; he might retire on payment of a
ransom for himself and his _droujina_. He capitulated, and the
conditions were broken. His guard was massacred, and he and his two
sons-in-law were stifled under planks. The Tartars held their festival
over the inanimate bodies, 1224.
After this thunderbolt, which struck terror into the whole of Russia,
the Tartars paused and returned to the East. Nothing more was heard of
them. Thirteen years passed, during which the princes reverted to
their perpetual discords. Those in the northeast had given no help to
the Russians of the Dnieper; perhaps the grand prince George II of
Suzdal[58] may have rejoiced over the humiliation of the Kievians and
Galicians. The Mongols were forgotten; the chronicles, however, are
filled with fatal presages: in the midst of scarcity, famine and
pestilence, of incendiaries in the towns and calamities of all sorts,
they remark on the comet of 1224, the earthquake, and eclipse of the
sun of 1230.
The Tartars were busy finishing the conquest of China, but presently
one of the sons of Genghis, Ugudei, sent his nephew Batu to the West.
As the reflux of the Polovtsi had announced the invasion of 1224, that
of the Saxin nomads, related to the Khirghiz who took refuge on the
lands of the Bulgarians of the Volga, warned men of a new irruption of
the Tartars, and indicated its direction. It was no longer South
Russia, but Sozdalian Russia, that was threatened. In 1237 Batu
conquered the Great City, capital of the half-civilized Bulgars, who
were, like the Polovtsi, ancient enemies of Russia, and who were to be
included in her ruin. Bolgary was given up to the flames, and her
inhabitants were put to the sword. The Tartars next plunged into the
deep forests of the Volga, and sent a sorcerer and two officers as
envoys to the princes of Riazan. The three princes of Riazan, those of
Pronsk, Kolomna, Moscow, and Murom, advanced to meet them.
"If you want peace," said the Tartars, "give us the tenth of your
goods."
"When we are dead," replied the Russian princes, "you can have the
whole."
Though abandoned by the princes of Tchernigoff and the grand prince
George II, of whom they had implored help, the dynasty of Riazan
accepted the unequal struggle. They were completely crushed; nearly
all their princes remained on the field of battle. Legend has
embellished their fall. It is told how Feodor preferred to die rather
than see his young wife, Euphrasia, the spoil of Batu; and how, on
learning his fate, she threw herself and her son from the window of
the _terem_. Oleg the Handsome, found still alive on the battle-field,
repelled the caresses, the attention, and religion of the Khan, and
was cut in pieces. Riazan was immediately taken by assault, sacked,
and burned. All the towns of the principality suffered the same fate.
It was now the turn of the Grand Prince, for the Russia of the
northeast had not even the honor of falling in a great battle like the
Russia of the southwest, united for once against the common enemy. The
Suzdalian army, commanded by a son of George II, was beaten on the day
of Kolomna, on the Oka. The Tartars burned Moscow, then besieged
Vladimir, the royal city, which George II had abandoned to seek for
help in the North. His two sons were charged with the defence of the
capital. Princes and boyars, feeling there was no alternative but
death or servitude, prepared to die. The princesses and all the nobles
prayed Bishop Metrophanes to give them the tonsure; and when the
Tartars rushed into the town by all its gates, the vanquished retired
into the cathedral, where they perished, men and women, in a general
conflagration. Suzdal, Rostoff, Yaroslavl, fourteen towns, and a
multitude of villages in the grand principality were also given over
to the flames, 1238. The Tartars then went to seek the Grand Prince,
who was encamped on the Sit, almost on the frontier of the possessions
of Novgorod.
George II could neither avenge his people nor his family. After the
battle, the Bishop of Rostoff found his headless corpse. His nephew,
Vassilko, who was taken prisoner, was stabbed for refusing to serve
Batu. The immense Tartar army, after having sacked Tver, took Torjok;
there "the Russian heads fell beneath the sword of the Tartars as
grass beneath the scythe." The territory of Novgorod was invaded; the
great republic trembled, but the deep forests and the swollen rivers
delayed Batu. The invading flood reached the Cross of Ignatius, about
fifty miles from Novgorod, then returned to the southeast. On the way
the small town of Kozelsk (near Kaluga) checked the Tartars for so
long, and inflicted on them so much loss, that it was called by them
the "wicked town." Its population was exterminated, and the prince
Vassili, still a child, was "drowned in blood."
The two following years, 1239-1240, were spent by the Tartars in
ravaging Southern Russia. They burned Pereiaslaf and Tchernigoff,
defended with desperation by its princes. Next Mangu, grandson of
Genghis Khan, marched against the famous town of Kiev, whose name
resounded through the East and in the books of the Arab writers. From
the left bank of the Dnieper, the barbarian admired the great city on
the heights of the right bank, towering over the wide river with her
white walls and towers adorned by Byzantine artists, and innumerable
churches with cupolas of gold and silver. Mangu proposed capitulation
to the Kievians; the fate of Riazan, of Tchernigof, of Vladimir, the
capitals of powerful states, announced to them the lot that awaited
them in case of refusal, yet the Kievians dared to massacre the envoys
of the Khan. Michael, their Grand Prince, fled; his rival, Daniel of
Galitch, did not care to remain.
On hearing the report of Mangu, Batu came to assault Kiev with the
bulk of his army. The grinding of the wooden chariots, the bellowings
of the buffaloes, the cries of the camels, the neighing of the horses,
the howlings of the Tartars rendered it impossible, says the annalist,
to hear your own voice in the town. The Tartars assailed the Polish
Gate and knocked down the walls with a battering-ram. The Kievians,
supported by the brave Dmitri, a Galician boyar, defended the fallen
ramparts till the end of the day, then retreated to the Church of the
Dime, which they surrounded by a palisade. The last defenders of Kiev
found themselves grouped around the tomb of Yaroslaff. Next day they
perished. The Khan gave the boyar his life, but the "Mother of Russian
cities" was sacked. The pillage was most terrible. Even the tombs were
not respected. All that remains of the Church of the Dime is a few
fragments of mosaic in the Museum at Kiev. St. Sophia and the
Monastery of the Catacombs were delivered up to be plundered, 1240.
Volhynia and Galicia still remained, but their princes could not
defend them, and Russia found herself, with the exception of Novgorod
and the northwest country, under the Tartar yoke. The princes had fled
or were dead: hundreds of thousands of Russians were dragged into
captivity. Men saw the wives of boyars, "who had never known work, who
a short time ago had been clothed in rich garments, adorned with
jewels and collars of gold, surrounded with slaves, now reduced to be
themselves the slaves of barbarians and their wives, turning the wheel
of the mill and preparing their coarse food."
If we look for the causes which rendered the defeat of the brave
Russian nation so complete, we may, with Karamsin, indicate the
following: 1. Though the Tartars were not more advanced, from a
military point of view, than the Russians, who had made war in Greece
and in the West against the most warlike and civilized people of
Europe, yet they had an enormous superiority of numbers. Batu probably
had with him five hundred thousand warriors. 2. This immense army
moved like one man; it could successively annihilate the droujinas of
the princes, or the militia of the towns, which only presented
themselves successively to its blows. The Tartars had found Russia
divided against herself. 3. Even though Russia had wished to form a
confederation, the sudden irruptions of an army entirely composed of
horsemen did not leave her time. 4. In the tribes ruled by Batu, every
man was a soldier; in Russia the nobles and citizens alone bore arms:
the peasants, who formed the bulk of the population, allowed
themselves to be stabbed or bound without resistance. 5. It was not by
a weak nation that Russia was conquered. The Tartar-Mongols, under
Genghis Khan, had filled the East with the glory of their name, and
subdued nearly all Asia. They arrived, proud of their exploits,
animated by the recollection of a hundred victories, and reinforced by
numerous peoples whom they had vanquished, and hurried with them to
the West.
When the princes of Galitch, of Volhynia, and of Kiev arrived as
fugitives in Poland and Hungary, Europe was terror-stricken. The Pope,
whose support had been claimed by the Prince of Galitch, summoned
Christendom to arms. Louis IX prepared for a crusade. Frederic II, as
emperor, wrote to the sovereigns of the West: "This is the moment to
open the eyes of body and soul now that the brave princes on whom we
reckoned are dead or in slavery." The Tartars invaded Hungary, gave
battle to the Poles in Liegnitz in Silesia, had their progress a long
while arrested by the courageous defence of Olmutz in Moravia, by the
Tcheque voievode Yaroslaff, and stopped finally, learning that a large
army, commanded by the King of Bohemia and the dukes of Austria and
Carinthia, was approaching. The news of the death of Oktai, second
Emperor of all the Tartars, in China, recalled Batu from the West, and
during the long march from Germany his army necessarily diminished in
number.
The Tartars were no longer in the vast plains of Asia and Eastern
Europe, but in a broken hilly country, bristling with fortresses,
defended by a population more dense and a chivalry more numerous than
those in Russia.
To sum up, all the fury of the Mongol tempest spent itself on the
Slavonic race. It was the Russians who fought at the Kalka, at
Kolomna, at the Sit; the Poles and Silesians at Liegnitz; the
Bohemians and Moravians at Olmutz. The Germans suffered nothing from
the invasion of the Mongols but the fear of it. It exhausted itself
principally on those plains of Russia which seem a continuation of the
steppes of Asia. Only in Russian history did the invasion produce
great results.
Batu built on one of the arms of the Lower Volga a city called Sarai
(the Castle), which became the capital of a powerful Tartar empire,
the "Golden Horde," extending from the Ural and Caspian to the mouth
of the Danube. The Golden Horde was formed not only of Tartar-Mongols
or Nogais, who even now survive in the Northern Crimea, but
particularly of the remains of ancient nomads, such as the Patzinaks
and Polovtsi, whose descendants seem to be the present Kalmucks and
Bashkirs; of Turkish tribes tending to become sedentary, like the
Tartars of Astrakhan in the present day; and of the Finnish
populations already established in the country, and which mixed with
the invaders.
Oktai, Kuluk, and Mangu, the first three successors of Genghis Khan,
elected by all the Mongol princes, took the title of "great khans,"
and the Golden Horde recognized their authority; but under his fourth
successor, Kublai, who usurped the throne and established himself in
China, this bond of vassalage was broken. The Golden Horde became an
independent state, 1260. United and powerful under the terrible Batu,
who died in 1255, it fell to pieces under his successors; but in the
fourteenth century the khan Uzbeck reunited it anew, and gave the
Horde a second period of prosperity. The Tartars, who were pagans when
they entered Russia, embraced, about 1272, the faith of Islam, and
became its most formidable apostles.