[REQUIRED READING]
FOR THE
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle for 1882-83.
FEBRUARY.
[HISTORY OF RUSSIA.]
By Mrs. MARY S. ROBINSON.
CHAPTER VII.
GALITSCH AND THE GREAT REPUBLIC OF NOVGOROD.
We have briefly traced the history of the principality of Kief and that of its rival, Suzdal. Another powerful state, in the twelfth century was Galitsch, the modern Gallicia, the Red Russia of former days, a region south of Poland. This province, peopled by the Khorvats, or white Kroats, had ever remained Slavonic in nationality. Its princes were elected by popular assembly, and retained their dominion by its consent. The intercourse of Galitsch with her neighbors, Hungary and Poland, led to the formation of a powerful aristocracy, which succeeded, first, in controlling the popular assembly, and later in superseding it by an assembly composed exclusively of nobles. When Iaroslaf Osmomuisl, the same whose praise is sung in the song of Igor, put away his wife, Olga, for his paramour, Anastasia, the nobles compelled him to burn the latter alive, to banish her son, and to recognize Olga’s Vladimir as the rightful heir. The young prince, however, followed in the dissolute ways of his father, and went so far as to take for his second wife the widow of a priest, in defiant violation of a law of the Greek Church. The boyars summoned him to deliver the woman over to punishment. The prince, alarmed, fled to Hungary with his family and his treasure; and though in the vicissitude of events, he was recalled after a time, and bore rule for some years before his death, his dominions passed to Roman, prince of Volhynia, whom the Gallicians had invited to bear rule over them when Vladimir had fled from the realm.
This Roman was no easy-going, light-hearted prince of the usual Slavonic type, but a southern Andrei, a stern hero, visiting vengeance upon his enemies and striking terror into the barbarians. The Gallician boyars who had opposed him were put to death by slow torture. To some who had escaped from the country he promised pardon, but upon their return he confiscated their possessions and procured their condemnation to death. He was wont to say: “To eat your honey in peace you must first kill the bees.” He put to flight the Lithuanian tribes of the north, and harnessed his prisoners to the plow. This act of subjugation is commemorated in the folk song: “Thou art terrible, Roman; the Lithuanians are thy laboring oxen.” The report of his stern valor reached the ears of Pope Innocent III, who sent missionaries to bring him over to the Papal Church, and who promised by the sword of Saint Peter to make a great king of the Gallician-Volhynian prince. In the presence of the envoys, Roman drew his own sword from its scabbard and asked: “Is the sword of Saint Peter as strong as mine? While I wear it by my side I need no help from another.” He met his death in an imprudent, unequal combat, during a war with Poland, in 1215. The chronicle of Volhynia names him “the Great,” “the Autocrat of all the Russias;” and the chroniclers generally extol him as a second Monomakh, a hero who “walked in the ways of God, who fell like a lion upon infidels, who swooped like an eagle upon his prey, who was savage as a wild-cat, deadly as a crocodile.”
A more magnanimous hero was Roman’s son, Daniel, whose youth was roughly schooled in adversity. To his principality came Mstislaf the Bold, son of that Mstislaf the Brave, whom we have seen defying the tyranny of Andrei Bogoliubski. The younger Mstislaf was a knight errant, riding hither and thither in search of adventures. He wedded his daughter to the young Daniel, and virtually bore rule in Galitsch till his death in 1228. In wars with the Hungarians, the Poles, the Tartars, Daniel demeaned himself as the worthy son of a mighty sire, and toward the Gallician boyars, whose turbulence had endangered the state, he used a repressive, though not so severe a policy as that pursued by Roman. The Mongol invasion, that overthrew all the Russian governments, ruined Galitsch for the time, along with the others. Daniel did his best to support his shattered country, but was compelled, as a matter of personal safety to take refuge in Hungary. When permitted to return to the desolated principality, he invited thither a vast number of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, upon whom he conferred abundant privileges as an inducement for them to remain in a depopulated country. The last named people, alien, tenacious, obnoxious to all Christian civilizations, an isolated race wherever their restless fate and their love of gain lead them to emigrate, have proved a disturbing element in Russian nationality. Incapable of assimilation, or unwilling thereto, their population of three millions have no interests, no sympathies with the rest of the nation, save in the intercourse connected with barter, or the stewardship of estates. A continual source of irritation and antagonism, they are “the Polish scourge” of the empire. The hospitality extended to them by Daniel Roman is regarded as the one mistake of his otherwise sagacious administration.
Unable to cope with the all-devouring Mongols, although he made repeated efforts to check their advances, Daniel took part in various European wars, always with brilliant success. The Hungarians spread the fame of the order of his troops, their oriental weapons, the magnificence of their prince, whose Greek habit was broidered with gold, whose caparisons glistened with richly-chased metals, and with jewels, whose saber and arrows were of marvellous workmanship. His warriors were equipped with short stirrups, high saddles, long caftans, or robes, turbans surmounted by aigrets, sabers and poniards in the belt, bows slung at the shoulder, and arrows in the quiver. Their coursers were fleet as the east wind.