The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

to complicate the struggle for mastery which was beginning to be waged in the pagan-inhabited lands at the mouth of the western Dvina and along the “Baltic gull-sought strand.” The institution of the Crusades and the erection of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem had aroused a spirit of religious and temporal colonisation and conquest, of which the seizure of Constantinople was a symptom, while on the other hand the comparative failure of the Asiatic expeditions and the recapture of Jerusalem by the Moslems had modified the crusading fervour and disinclined the champions of the Cross to seek adventures so far afield. Hence many Catholic princes and knights were glad to avail themselves of the Papal permission to divert their pious raids from the valley of the Jordan to the shores of the Baltic, a more convenient locality, where they might gain, in addition to their eternal salvation, welcome pieces of earthly territory. Danes, Swedes, the Sword Brothers, and later (in 1230) the Teutonic Order, fought indiscriminately with the native pagans, with the Russians, and with themselves for the advancement of the Catholic religion and of their own interests. Estland, Kourland, Livland, Lit’uania, and Prussia became happy hunting-grounds for these various adventurers and military companies, and the unfortunate inhabitants, confronted with an embarras du richesse in the way of spiritual guides, knew not which way to turn for safety. A Tchoud notable was hanged by the Danes for having received baptism from the Sword Order, and the Latin and Orthodox Christians systematically destroyed each other’s churches and settlements whenever they had the opportunity. Of the knights of the two Orders, however, it may be said that the cruelties and oppressions with which they sought to harry the heathen into their particular fold were in some measure condoned by the splendid bravery and devotion which they displayed in carrying out their self-imposed task. Moreover, it was to these northern crusaders that the Baltic provinces owed many of their most important towns: Riga was the creation of the Knights of Jesus; Thorn, Kulm, and Elbing marked the rise of the Teutonic Order; Revel sprang into existence under Danish auspices. It was during a combat in the neighbourhood of the latter town that the Danes received “from the clouds” the red flag blazoned with a white cross which has since remained their national standard—a mark of Divine favour which did not, however, cause the immediate withdrawal of their Christian competitors. The cruelties and dissensions of the invaders moved the inhabitants of Northern Livland to throw off the Catholic yoke and call the citizens of Novgorod to their assistance, propitiating them with a portion of the spoil they had wrested from the Germans and Skandinavians. Novgorod, by a curious revulsion of feeling, had, after a succession of princes of the house of Souzdal, elected the same Yaroslav who had treated her people with such heartless cruelty. Possibly, in the turn affairs were taking on their west, the Novgorodskie saw an opportunity for employing his malignant genius against their obnoxious enemies. But the warlike efforts of the men of Lake Ilmen and their Souzdalian prince were neutralised by the fact that the Germans, fighting behind the walls of their towns, were more skilled in the handling of the slings and stone-hurling engines, the rude artillery of the day; the old Russian proverb, “Who can resist God and Velikie Novgorod?” had to be modified in the face of such weapons of precision, and the Westerners remained masters of the greater part of the disputed territories.

      Two hundred years of unending domestic strife, carving and shredding off into a crowd of incoherent provinces—Kiev, Tchernigov, Riazan, Souzdal, Smolensk, Polotzk, Novgorod, Pskov, Volhynia, Galitz, and others of less importance—had not fitted Russia to contend with the expanding powers of Catholic Christendom, or to show a solid front against the incursion of teeming Asiatic hordes on her east.

The Chronicles of Russian history at this period were wholly in the hands of the monks who wrote them around the deeds of the princes or of the luminaries of the Church; hence little can be gleaned from them of the social life and condition of the people, who existed therein solely for the purposes of supplying raw material for a massacre or a pestilence. The history of Novgorod is valuable as yielding occasional glimpses of the life-pulse that beat beneath the over-crust of court or cathedral annals, but this city was too impregnated with outside influences to furnish a faithful picture of the inward state of old-time Russia. Of the towns it may be broadly stated that they were yet little more in scope than walled villages; universities or seats of learning other than the monkish cloister there were none, and much of the trade was in the hands of foreign merchants. The wealthy boyarins had their houses and palaces clustered within the walls, and often possessed in addition other houses in the sloboda, or detached village, without, where there was more space available for gardens, etc. Freemen as well as slaves (the latter captured in war or bought) were in their service, but the abject poverty of the lower classes of freemen bound them in almost servile dependence on their masters. Even more grinding was the normal state of poverty in which the peasants eked out their livelihood, and the name smerd applied to them was one of contempt, something akin to our “rascallion.” For the most part the peasants tilled the soil for the landowners under a system which allowed them a half, or other fixed share, of the harvest produced, the freeman having this distinction from the kholop or bondman that he was able to move from one estate to another at will. Under these conditions of hand-to-mouth existence farm-craft remained at a very low ebb; with axe, scythe, and plough the peasant won precarious roothold for his crops, which might be blighted by an untimely frost-coming or damaged by a too-late thaw, leaving him to propitiate his appeal-court of saints by an involuntary emptiness ofstomach. With cattle-stock, horses, and horned beasts, the Russian lands, of the north especially, were ill-provided, and possibly this was partly the outcome of the unsettled state of the country, which discouraged the multiplication of movable property, even the heaviest church bells being now and again swept off in the wake of some pilfering kniaz-raid.34

22 See Table I. for Grand Princes of Kiev.

23 The affix vitch signifies son of: Sviatoslavitch—son of Sviatoslav.

24 Vseslav Briatcheslavitch.

25 “The Song of the Expedition of Igor.”

26 Georg Pray.

27 N. G. Riesenkampff, Der Deutsche Hof zu Nowgorod.

28 Rambaud, History of Russia.

29 See Table III. for house of Souzdal.

30 Stribog was the Slavonic wind-god.

31 Rendered into English partly from H. von Paucker’s German translation, Das Lied von der Heerfahrt Igor’s Fürsten von Seversk, and partly from a modernised Russian reproduction of the Slavonic text.

32 Kadlubek, Origine et rebus gestis Polonorum.

33 S. Solov’ev.

34 Karamzin; S. Solov’ev; Schiemann; Kostomarov, Sieverno Rousskiya Narodopravstva, Chronique de Nestor.

      CHAPTER IV

       THE COMING OF THE MONGOLS

       Table of Contents

      As