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.
[Map showing the position of the tribes formerly inhabiting Russia.]
Transcriber's Note: for a larger image of the map, click on the image itelf.
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 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: