In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, three new races entered
Slavonia whose character essentially modified its subsequent history.
From the northwest came the Germans, from the east the Tartar Mongols,
from the west the Lithuanians. The modern Russian divisions of Livonia
and Esthonia, with the outlying regions, were peopled in the ninth
century with the Tchud or Lett tribes, of the Finnish race,—the most
ancient, it is believed, of living European peoples. The Russian Finns
of the present time number one and a half million souls; but though
they long retained their distinctive nationality, they have yielded
to the process of “Russification,” and to-day, among the majority
of them, their ancient character is noticeable merely by certain
peculiarities of physiognomy and dialect. They are short and thick
of stature, tough as oak, and of a hickory hue. The countenance is
blurred and unfinished, so to speak. The face is broad and flat, the
cheek bones high, the nose depressed and bridgeless. Their dialects are
primitive and meager. Their manners and superstitions are traceable
to the earliest of known races; their religious observances antedate
those of any known form of paganism. They remain, in fact, pagan at
heart, loyal to their ancient gods, though with these they are willing
to give Saint Nicholas some qualified homage. They recognize a good
and an evil principle, both to be equally revered. An offspring and
mingling of the two is Keremet, who, with his progeny of Keremets, is
more mischievous than malevolent, and to whom, far in the depths of
the forests, offerings and sacrifices are made. The evil principle is
Shaïtan, philologically allied with the Arabic Shatana, and the still
older Hebrew Sâtân. The Finn buys his bride, by paying to her father a
_kalm_ or fee. With his fellows he practices an agricultural communism.
Through a thousand years he has remained without education, incapable,
apparently, of progress, unchangeable. At present, however, the Russian
Finn, along with the other races of the country, is being merged into
the ubiquitous, self-asserting Russian.
The Baltic Letts, occupying Esthonia, had been subjugated by the Dane,
Knut the Great, the conqueror of England. But Livonia had submitted to
the arms of Iaroslaf the Great, who founded there Iurief, later called
Dorpat; and Mstislaf, son of Vladimir Monomakh, had taken one of the
chief cities of the Tchudi. The princes of Polotsk and the republic
of Novgorod claimed the country and virtually bore rule over it. To
Livonia early in the twelfth century came the German merchant in search
of trade, and the Latin priest, seeking souls for his hire and subjects
for his Pope. The monk Meinhard, commissioned by the Archbishop of
Bremen, compulsorily brought the Livonians under his sway, and was
constituted bishop of their country. But this invasion of a stranger
race bearing the wares of commerce, and the authority of Rome behind
the symbol of the cross, implied the overthrow of the untutored but
brave descendants of the Tchud hero Kalevy, the extinction of their
liberties and their independence. In 1187 Meinhard completed a church
at Uexhüll, and surrounded it with a fortification. Eleven years later
the tribes revolted against their episcopal master, and killed him in
open warfare. They then plunged into the Dwina to wash off and send
back to Germany their baptism, and restored to their shrines their
ancient gods. Innocent III preached a crusade against them, and another
bishop, commander of a large fleet, built for his capital the town of
Riga (1200). In the following year was established the Order of the
Brothers of the Army of Christ, or the Sword Bearers, later known as
the Livonian Knights, “men of iron,” who broke the strength of the
tribes, and against whom the Russian princes, occupied with their
own dissensions, made no united resistance. The knights intrenched
themselves firmly in the regions whither they hewed with the sword a
pathway for the cross, and built fortifications of cemented stone,
that were a wonder and a terror to the simple natives, who were driven
in herds to the waters of baptism, or massacred if they offered
resistance. A song of the Tchudi of Pskof, entitled “The Days of
Slavery,” commemorates this period of misery: “Destroying fiends were
unchained against us. The priests strangled us with their rosaries, the
greedy knights plundered us, murderers with their weapons cut us in
pieces. The father of the cross stole our wealth; he stole the treasure
from the hiding place. He hewed down the sacred tree, he polluted the
fountain, the waters of salvation. The axe smote the oak of Tara, the
cruel hatchet the tree of Kero.”
About 1225, a second military order established itself in Livonia, and
built four considerable towns, among them Thorn and Koenigsberg, in
the depopulated country. Their black cross was borne, along with the
red cross of the sword-bearers, and in course of time the two orders
became associated, and together imposed a crushing servitude upon the
remnants of the Tchudi, who were reduced to a form of serfdom; and
though in later times their liberty has been yielded them again, the
German nobility retained their lands. The aboriginal Livonian remained
ever separate from his conqueror, the Papal German. The Kalevy-Poeg,
the epic of the Tchud Esthonians, recites the career of the son of
Kalev, the personification of the race, the hero of Titanic force. He
swam the Gulf of Finland. His club was the trunk of an oak; with his
horse and his immense harrow he plowed all Esthonia; he exterminated
the beasts of prey, conquered the magicians of Finland, and the genii
of the caves. He descended into hell and had single combat with Sarvig,
the horned. He sailed to the ends of the earth, and when the fiery
breath of the northern spirits burned his vessel, he built another of
silver. When the heavens were lurid with the flames of these spirits,
he laughed and said to his pilot: “With their darts of fire they light
us on our way, since the sun has gone to rest, and we are passed beyond
the daylight.” No fury of the elements could destroy him. He went to
the isle of flame, of smoke, and of boiling water, where the mountains
throw forth fire (Iceland). There he encountered a giant woman, who,
plucking grass for her kine, crushed with it several of his sailors, as
if they had been insects. He fought with men whose bodies were those
of dogs, possibly the Greenland Esquimaux; and pauses in his onward
strides only when told by a magician that the wall of the world’s end
is still far away. When he is told of the landing of the sword-bearers,
the men whose armor can neither be pierced with the spear nor cleft
with the axe, his unconquerable heart is troubled. He seeks the tomb
of his father for counsel, but the place is silent; the leaves murmur
plaintively, the winds sigh, the dew itself is moved, the eye of the
clouds is wet, all Esthonian nature shares in the forebodings of the
national hero. He gathers his warriors by the Embach, and raises the
battle cry. Bloody is the field, mournful the victory! All the brave
are slain, the brothers of Kalevy-Poeg among them. His charger is cut
down by the hand of the stranger. He who had overcome the demon Sarvig,
who had laughed at the spirits of the north, could not subdue the men
of iron, whose strength surpassed that of the gods. Captive to Mana,
god of death, his wrist held fast in a cleft of the rock hard by the
gate of hell, he comes no more to vindicate the liberties of his sons,
his people. Long looked they for his return; but like his kinsman,
perhaps his sire, Kolyvan, who lies under the rock whereon is built the
city of Revel, he is holden captive of Mana. Thus sorrowfully closes
the career of the Arthur of this primitive people.
The German planted region was destined to be a thorn in the side of
Russia. Protracted wars were maintained between the foreigners of the
west and the Slavs of the realm. Four hundred years passed ere an
appearance of tranquillity and of union was attained; and even now the
governments of Esthonia and Livonia are not among the more trusted
provinces of the empire. The people of that region, restive under
absolutism, dimly conscious of rights withheld, and of oppressive
restrictions, encourage the spirit of revolution, and invite to their
sea-bordered home many of the malcontents of the empire.
Up to the opening of the thirteenth century, Russian civilization had
kept a relative pace with that of the east. Receiving industries, arts
and religion from Byzantium, and civic form from Scandinavia, it had
been united under Iaroslaf the Great, and had maintained with some
degree of order feudal divisions corresponding to those of the other
European nations in the same centuries. This relative development the
empire bade fair to maintain without serious lapses, when a calamity
utterly without precedent, immeasurably disastrous, suddenly fell upon
the realm, and shattered her incipient civilization beyond the power
of repairing. Nature has been a step-mother to Russia, says one of her
native historians. Fate was a second, a harsher step-mother.
“In those times, (1224) there came upon us, on account of our sins,
unknown nations,” write the chroniclers. No one could tell their
origin, whence they came, what religion they professed. “God alone knew
who they were: God, and perhaps a few wise men learned in books.” All
Europe was affrighted at the apparition of these Asiatic hordes. The
Pope and the sovereigns prepared to meet them with combined forces.
But upon Russia alone fell the shock, the subjugation, the humiliating
servitude, imposed by these numberless and mysterious armies, whom
it was whispered among the people were Gog and Magog, prophesied to
come at the end of the world, when all things would be destroyed by
anti-Christ.
The Ta-ta, Das, or Tatars were Mongol, pastoral tribes, settled at the
base of the Altai Mountains. Occupied exclusively with their flocks,
they wandered from pasture to pasture, from river to river. The Land
of Grass is the name given to-day, by the inhabitants, to modern
Tartary. They built no walls nor towns, knew nothing of writing or
of arts beyond the simplest. Their treaties were made orally. They
were equally destitute of laws and of religion, save perhaps a vague
adoration of the sun. They respected nothing but strength and bravery:
age and weakness they despised, and like other barbarians, they left
the pining, the feeble and the aged among them to perish. Their food
was milk and the flesh of their herds: their clothing was made of the
skins of their animals. They practiced polygamy, and had a community
of wives; when the father died the son married his younger wives.
Trained to ride from their infancy, they were taught also to let fly
their arrows at birds and other small creatures, and thus acquired the
courage and skill essential to their predatory existence. They had no
infantry, and laid no sieges. When they would capture a town, they fell
upon the suburban villages. Each leader seized ten men and compelled
them to carry wood, stones, and whatever material was accessible
for the filling up of fosses. The prisoners were also forced to dig
trenches. But save for purposes of utility, they took no prisoners,
choosing rather the extermination of the entire population.
This barbarous and appalling people, in their earlier advances, invaded
China, whither they passed with incomprehensible suddenness: nor of
the direction of their movements, nor of their departure could aught
be presaged. The present dynasty of that country is of the Mantchoo
Tatars, who, in respect of political influence, are dominant in the
empire.
As they increased and formed a rude nationality, a mighty chief arose
among them, Temutchin, or Genghis Khan. In a general congress of their
princes, assembled early in the thirteenth century, he proclaimed
himself emperor, averring that as but one sun shone in the heavens, in
like manner the whole earth should be subject to one sole sovereign.
Placing himself at the head of this nation, composed of half a
million armed cavalry, he initiated a widely devastating conquest, by
destroying the teeming populations of Mantchuria, Tangut, Northern
China, Turkestan, Great Bokhara, and the remainder of Western Asia to
the plains of the Crimea.
The ruin inflicted by these wild hordes has never been repaired. During
the captainship of Genghis Khan, an approximately correct estimate
shows that eighteen million five hundred thousand human beings were
slaughtered by his horsemen in China and Tangut alone. Turkestan, once
called the Garden of the East, and Great Bokhara, after the lapse of
six centuries, bear the evidences of the Tatar invasion on their many
depopulated wastes. Upon the occupation of Nessa, a town in Kiva, the
people were bound together in couples, and above seventy thousand were
despatched thus by the Tatar arrows. At Merv, seven hundred thousand,
or, according to another authority, one million three hundred thousand
corpses were left to corrupt the atmosphere once teeming with life,
and rich in its bountiful fruitfulness. At Nishapoor, in Persia, seven
hundred and forty-seven thousand lives were extinguished. To prevent
the living from hiding under the piles of the dead, the bodies were
decapitated. At Herat, in Afghanistan, one million six hundred thousand
were mowed down by the Tatar cimetars. After the enemy had vanished,
forty persons, the mournful remnant from the massacre, came together
in the principal mosque of the ruined city. These regions have never
recovered a tithe of their former prosperity.
[To be continued.]