Peter the Great

Front matter

SA

= a es Se es ve à

Cornell University

Preface

* Measure thy powers on thine undertaking—and not the undertaking by thy powers.’

THIS bold advice, the dictum of a poet and fellow-countryman of my own, has been the almost indispensable inspiration of this historical work of mine. The figure which forms its subject—towering above the history, bound up, to this very hour, with the existence, of the Russian nation—is not one to be lightly approached. |

Therefore it is that I have come to him so late, that I have worked backwards, up the course of the years, from the great Inheritress to the creator of her inheritance.

Have I dared, then, at last, to exchange glances with that great bronze giant, who, so the poets say, ‘steps down, on twilight nights, from his granite pedestal, hard by the Neva river-bank, and rides through the sleeping city’—-triumphant even in death? Have I indeed—oh, mighty ghost! who, for well-nigh two hundred years, like some terrible and familiar demon, hauntest the places thou didst know in life,—have I, in good truth, happened on the magic formula which brings back speech to phantoms, and builds life up around them, out of the dust of bygone days?

I have lived those dead hours over again, in fancy, I have seen the faces, I have felt the warmth, of the beings and the things that filled them. I have laid my finger on the miracle of that legendary reign—the realisation of the fabled grain of wheat which sprouts and straightway grows into a vi PETER THE GREAT plant on the palm of the Hindu Yoghz’s hand. And I have had speech with the Man of Miracles himself,—the one unique man, perhaps, in the history of the human race. Napoleon is the greatest of Frenchmen, or the greatest of Italians, according to the fancy of his historian. He is not France nor Italy incarnate. Peter is Russia—her flesh and blood, her temperament and genius, her virtues and her vices. With his various aptitudes, his multiplicity of effort, his tumultuous passions, he rises up before us, a collective being. This makes his greatness. This raises him far above the pale shadows which our feeble historical evocation strives to snatch out of oblivion. There is no need to call his figure up. He stands before us, surviving his own existence, perpetuating himself—a continual actual fact.

The face of the world he seems to have called out of chaos may have modified, but the principle of its existence is unchanged. The immeasurable force is there, which, these three centuries past, has defied all calculation, which has transformed Ivan’s wretched patrimony,—a sparsely inhabited patch of wild steppe land,—into the inheritance of Alexander and of Nicholas—into an empire exceeding in size and population every other known sovereignty in Europe, Asia,and Africa—surpassing those of Alexander the Great, or Ancient Rome, the realm of the Khaliphs, and even the present British Empire, with all its colonies—an area of some eight and a half millions of square miles, a population of one hundred and twenty million souls! Once upon a time that force was called ‘ Peterthe Great.’ The name is changed now. The characteristics are unchanged. It is still the soul of a great people—and the soul, too, of a great man, in whom the thoughts and wills of millions of human beings appear incarnate. That force is centred in him, and he in it. I have tried, in these pages of mine, to make it throb.

Not, be sure, by mere dint of my imagination. Everything that could be drawn from documentary evidence—the only pass-key which can re-open the doors each passing hour

PREFACE vii closes upon’us—I ‘have used. I hope I have been exact. I know I have been sincere; I may have roused surprise, disappointment, even anger. I would urge my Russian readers to weigh their impressions carefully. Courage to acknowledge what one is, and even what one has been, is a very necessary quality. For Russia, this courage is a very easy one.

I would pray my Russian readers too, and all others, not to misunderstand the nature of the object I have set before me. When Poushkin was collecting materials for his biography of the national hero, he spoke of raising a monument—aere perennius, which was to be too firmly set to be removed by human hand, and dragged from square to square. Some national grudge, it would appear, existed— some doubt was felt, as to the unchangeable stability of Falconnet’s masterpiece. The poet’s ambition, his care for his subject’s reputation, common to most of my forerunners, not in Russia only, have never affected me. Peter—without any help of mine—already has the monument which, as I fain would think, befits him best. Not Poushkin’s, nor yet the work of the French sculptor’s chisel. The monument of which I speak was begun by his own rugged hands. His successors will labour on it, yet, for many a year. The last stone set, and that a mighty one, is the Trans-Siberian railway.

My object, as T say, has been very different. The eyes of the whole modern world have long been fixed—some- in sympathy, others, again, dark with suspicion and hostility— on the mighty sea of physical and moral energy which surged up suddenly between Old Europe, wearied out with eager life, and Ancient Asia, wearied, too, with the stillness and stagnation of hers. Will the common destinies of the two Continents sink in that huge abyss? Or will its waters prove another Fountain of Jouvence? The whole world hangs over the chasm, on either side, waiting in anxious apprehension, peering into the depths, striving to fathom them. My part is simply to offer certain information to this universal curiosity and dread.

viii PETER THE GREAT

Behold! This may be the appointed hour! The dawn of an unknown day whitens the sky. A mist, where phantom figures seem to float, rises over the broad river. Hark! Was it a horse’s hoof that rang on the silent stones? ...

K. W,

CHAP. PAGE 1. THE KREML, AND THE GERMAN FAUBOURG, . . 3 I. THE TSAREVNA SOPHIA, . . = 21

III. THE MONASTERY OF THE TROITSA, 43

IL.

Book Ii—the Lessons Of The Civilised World

A WARLIKE APPRENTICESHIP — THE CREATION OF THE NAVY—THE CAPTURE OF AZOF, 53

THE JOURNEY — GERMANY—HOLLAND—ENGLAND — THE RETURN, . : ; ; : 74

PART I—ZHE MAN_ >

BOOK I—BODY AND MIND

I. PHYSICAL PORTRAIT—CHARACTERISTIC TRAITS, . . 103

Il.

Hl.

IV.

“IDEAS, PRINCIPLES, AND SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT, 167

PRIVATE LIFE, . i ; 187 x PETER THE GREAT

BOOK II—THE TSARS ASSOCIATES

CHAP. PAGE I. COLLABORATORS, FRIENDS AND FAVOURITES, . +. 201 Il. THE FEMININE ELEMENT, ‘ . . : 284 Ill. CATHERINE, . a , : z +. 263

PART IIIl—A/7S WORK :

BOOK I—EXTERNAL STRUGGLE—WAR AND DIPLOMACY

CHAP. PAGE I, FROM NARVA TO POLTAVA, I700-1709, . ‘ + 291 ll. FROM THE BALTIC TO THE CASPIAN, s 329

III. THE APOGEE—-FRANCE, . a + 358

BOOK II—THE INTERNAL STRUGGLE—-THE REFORMS I. THE NEW REGIME—-THE END OF THE STRELTSY— ST. PETERSBURG, . : : + 392 \dI. MORALS—HABITS AND CUSTOMS, 7 + 413

V1ll. THE ECCLESIASTICAL REFORMS AND THE SUPPRESSION OF THE PATRIARCHATE, -

: 441 VV. THE SOCIAL REFORM—THE TABLE OF RANKS, . « 452 V. PETER’S ECONOMIC WORK, : À ‘ . 462 Vl. THE POLITICAL WORK OF PETER THE GREAT, + 478 VII. THE ARMY AND THE NAVY, ; : . 498 VIII. THE OPPOSITION—THE TSAREVITCH ALEXIS, . . 508

IX. PETER THE GREAT’S LAST WILL—CONCLUSION, + 544

PART I

HIS EDUCATION

BOOK I—FROM ASIA TO EUROPE

I. The marriage of Tsar Alexis—The choice of the bride—The crown to the

fairest—The dormitory in the Kreml—Nathalia Naryshkin—The birth of . Peter—His paternity contested—The struggle between the Naryshkin and the Miloslavski—Exile.

11. The Kreml: Crypt, Seraglio, and Gaol—Ten centuries of history—Russia of Moscow, and Russia of Kief—The Norman Conquest—Vanished glories —The sons of Rurik—Jaroslav the Great, and Henry the First of France —The Mongol invasion—Utter downfall—Recovery—Muscovite Hegemony under a Mongol protectorate—Emancipation—Ivan the Great— Dawn of a new culture—European influences—Poles, Germans, English, and Dutchmen.

ti. The German Faubourg—Europe and Asia—A Muscovite Ghetto—The work of civilisation—Expansion—Thither Peter will go.

Iv. Times of trial—The last attempt at an Asiatic régim—Deaths of Alexis and Féodor—An elected Tsar—The 76/e of the Patriarchs—The victory of the Naryshkin—Peter proclaimed—A short-lived triumph—The revenge of the Miloslavski.

I

PETER ALEKSIEIEVITCH was born. on the 30th of May 1672—the year 7180, according to the calendar then used in his country.

Two years and a half before his birth, the ancient Kreml of Moscow had beheld a strange sight. Dozens of young girls, chosen amongst the loveliest discoverable, drawn from the most distant provinces, from every rank and station,— gentle and simple, from castle and from hut, and even from religious houses, had entered the Tsar’s palace, on a day

1 The name is thus spelt and pronounced in Russian, Kremlin is a spurious form, of Polish origin.

appointed by himself. There, crowded haphazard into the six rooms appointed to their use, they had led the usual life of Muscovite wives and maidens of that age—the cloistered existence, idle and monotonous, of Eastern women, scarce broken by some slight manual task, scarce brightened, here and there, by an occasional song. Thus, all day long they dreamt, and pined, and sighed, and yawned over oft-repeated tales and legends, bristling with wonderful absurdities. But when night fell, ah! then all the hours of weariness, and disgust, and impatient longing, were forgotten; and each young creature, her every sense on the alert, felt her soul leap and tremble with the sudden palpitation of a tremendous chance, in the feverish but short-iived sensation, nightly recurring, of an exquisite terror, and anxiety, and hope. Masculine forms loomed on the threshold of the suite of rooms, which were converted into dormitories when darkness fell. Two men passed between the narrow beds, leisurely examining the lovely sleepers, exchanging significant words and gestures. And one of these was the Tsar Alexis Mihailovitch—the Tsar himself—zz propria persona, accompanied by his doctor, and seeking, amongst those unknown beauties, his chosen wife,—‘the woman, as the time-honoured formula has it, ‘ worthy to be the Sovereign’s delight, the woman whom, though she were the daughter of the meanest of his serfs, he might, on the morrow, make a Grand Duchess first, and then Tsarina of all the Russias. The custom, two centuries old already, had been borrowed from the Byzantines, partly for high political reasons, a little too, out of sheer necessity. Ivan Vassilévitch (‘the Great, 1425-1505), had vainly sought a wife for his son among the princesses of foreign houses. The King of Denmark, the Margrave of Brandenbiurg, had alike rebuffed him scornfully. And he would have no more alliances with his neighbours and rivals, the Russian Dukes. So he caused fifteen hundred maidens to be gathered together at Moscow —the Grand Ducal coronet should be bestowed on the fairest, at all events, if not on the most nobly born. A century later, the Tsar Michael Féodorovitch, who attempted matrimony with a foreign princess, met with no better success. The Danish King even went so far as to refuse to receive the Russian Envoys.! From that time out, the custom had been 1 Zabielin, Domestic History of the Tsarinas (Moscow, 1872), p. 245.

definitely established. Certain ladies and gentlemen of the Court were deputed to examine the young girls who came to Moscow, in answer to the Imperial call. Their inspection, minute and severe, extended to the most intimate details. Thus, by a process of selection, only the daintiest morsels were actually presented to the Tsar.

But occasionally, as in 1670, this custom became a mere formality. The dreams of the fair sleepers were doomed, this time, to disappointment; their nocturnal wiles were to be displayed in vain. The Sovereign’s choice had been fixed before their arrival in the city. The Tsar Alexis Mihaïlovitch was thirty-eight years of age when his first wife—a Miloslavski, who had borne him five sons and eight daughters—died, in the year 1667. Of these sons, three were already dead; the survivors, Féodor and Ivan, were both sickly ; and the Tsar’s evident duty was to consider the question of remarriage. He considered it seriously, when his eye fell, one day, in the house of Artamon Sierguéiévitch Matviéief, on a beautiful brunette, whom he took, at first, for the daughter of his favourite counsellor. Nathalia Kirillovna Naryshkin was only his ward, confided by her father, an obscure and needy country gentleman, to the care of the rich and powerful boyard. The fair Nathalia could never have burst on her Sovereign’s dazzled eyes in any true Muscovite house, where local custom was held in due respect. The young girl must have remained invisible, behind the impenetrable portals of the zerem. But the Matviéief household was emancipated from the ordinary rule. Artamon had married a foreigner—a Hamilton. The tempest of revolution which had overwhelmed the great Jacobite families, had cast up some branches of them, even upon the inhospitable shores of that distant and barbarous empire. Alexis welcomed the strangers, and Matviéief actually owed a portion of his master’s favour to his alliance with one of them. His marriage had also given him a certain culture. He read much; hehad a library, a museum, a small chemical laboratory. Nathalia had her place at her adopted parents’ table—sometimes even amongst their guests. Alexis began by saying he would undertake to find the girl a husband ‘who would ask for no fortune with her” Then, suddenly, he made up his mind and spoke out. Artamon Siergué-

1 Zabielin, Domestic History of the Tsarinas (Moscow, 1872), p. 222, iévitch was more alarmed than pleased. His position as imperial favourite had already procured him numerous enemies. Sprung from a somewhat obscure family, he had pushed himself into the foremost rank, he was at the head of various departments; he managed Foreign Affairs, the Mint, he was Court Minister, Commander of the Szre/ésy, Governor of Little Russia, of Kasan and of Astrakan. He begged, at all events, to be shielded by appearances. Nathalia had to show herself in the dormitory at the Kreml. All the rites were scrupulously observed. The uncle of one fair aspirant actually had to face the justice of the Tsar for having used fraudulent manceuvres in his niece’s favour, and was put to the question, ordinary and extraordinary, by the knout, by the strappado, and by fire. The marriage was solemnised on 22nd January 1671, and on 30th May (12th June) 1672, Nathalia Kirillovna bore a son.

On that very day, Louis XIV. supplied Boileau with the subject of a famous epistle, as he watched his army, led by Condé and Turenne, pass over the Rhine. On that very day, too, at the opposite end of Europe, the Turkish army passed the Dniester, to clasp hands across space with that of the Grand Monarque, and take the Empire in the rear. Neither of these events awoke much interest at Moscow, where all were rejoicing over the birth of the Tsarevitch. Life there was too circumscribed and obscure to be much affected by the great currents of European politics. Obscure and doubtful, too, to this very hour, is the birthplace of the greatest man Russia ever produced. Was it the Moscow Kreml? the neighbouring country house of Kolomenskoïé, dubbed the Russian Bethlehem? Or wasit Ismailovo? No absolute certainty exists. The dispute is carried further still. Peter bore no resemblance, physical or moral, to his elder brothers and sisters,—puny and feeble all of them, like Féodor and Ivan, all, even the fair Sophia herself, bearing a taint in their blood. And could Alexis, worn out by illness, foredoomed to an early death, have bestowed, on any son of his, that giant stature, those iron muscles, that full life? Who then? Was it the German surgeon, who replaced the daughter Nathalia really brought into the world, by his own son? Was it the courtier, Tihone Nikititch Streshnief, a man of humble birth, lately brought into prominence by the marriage of the Tsar Michael Romanof with the fair

Eudoxia? Once upon a time, Peter, heated with wine, sought (so at least the story goes) to peer into this shadow. ‘That fellow, he cried, pointing to one of the company, Ivan Mussin-Pushkin, ‘ knows, at all events, that he is my father’s son! Whose son am I? Yours, Tihon Streshnief? Obey me, speak, and fear nothing! Speak! or I’ll have you strangled!’

‘ Batiushka, mercy!’ comes the answer. ‘I know not what to say. . . . I was not the only one!’

But every kind of story has been told!

The death of Alexis (1674) marks the beginning of a troubled period, out of which Peter’s despotic power rises, storm-laden and blood-stained, like the times which gave it birth.

This period makes its definite mark on the destiny of the future Reformer. From its very outset, he becomes the hero of a drama, the naturally indicated chief of an opposition party. Beside the yet warm corpse of their common Master, the two families, called out of their obscurity by the Tsar’s two marriages, engage in desperate struggle.

The Naryshkins of a later generation have claimed a relatively illustrious origin, in connection with a Czech family, the Narisci, which once reigned at Egra. But the Tartar Narish, noted by the historian Miiller as one of the familiars of the ÆXwzaz Ivan Vassilévitch (1463), would appear a more authentic ancestor.

The Miloslavski were the Muscovite branch of the Korsak, an ancient Lithuanian family, settled in Poland. Deprived by the new comers of their rank and influence, they felt themselves alike injured and humiliated. Nathalia’s father, Kiril Poluiektovitch, had risen, in a few years, to be one of the richest men in the country, Court Councillor (dummnyi dvorianin) and Grand Officer of the Crown (okolzztshy?). The bells that tolled for the funeral of Alexis rang out the hour of vengeance on his rival’s ears. ‘Miloslavski against Naryshkin!’ For the next thirteen years that war-cry was to rule the fate of Russia, casting it into the bloodstained struggle between the two parties fighting for power.

1 Vockerodt, Correspondence (published by Herrmann, Leipsic, 1872), p. 108. Solovief, Hist. of Russia (Moscow, 1864-1878), vol. xv. pp. 126-135. Siemievski, Study of the State Police in Russia (Slovo i Dielo) (St. Petersburg, 1885), p. 139. Dolgoroukof, Mémoires (Geneva, 1867), vol. i. p. 102.

Matviéief, Nathalia’s adoptive father, beaten in his first skirmish, heads the list of victims. He was imprisoned, tortured, exiled to Pustoziersk in Siberia, where he almost died of hunger For a moment, there was some question of immuring Nathalia in a cloister; but the mother and son were finally sent to Préobrajenskoié, a village near Moscow, where Alexis had built him a house. Thus Peter left the Kreml, never to return, save for a very short space of time, during which he was to endure the most. cruel trials, the most odious outrages, to watch the murder of his own kinsfolk, to see the Sovereign’s authority cast down into the lowest depths, to witness his own downfall. Then it was that he vowed relentless hatred to the gloomy palace. Even as Conqueror and all-powerful Master, he pointedly turned his back upon it. That rupture was the symbol of his life and of its work.

Il

The Kreml of the present day—a crowded and haphazard collection of incongruuus buildings, utterly devoid, for the most part, of style or character—conveys but a faint conception of the palace of Alexis Mihailovitch, as it appeared at the end of the seventeenth century. The fires of 1701 and 1737, and the reconstruction which took place in 1752? have left the barest traces of the curious Italian Renaissance, introduced, at the close of the fifteenth century, by the daughter of a Paleologus, educated at Rome? Some vestiges still exist of the struggle of the genius of Fioravante, of Solaro, of Alevise, with Byzantine tradition; a few churches, a few fragments of palaces, and the outer walls— more like those of a fortified camp than of a royal residence, with their far-stretching low ramparts, and their brick towers showing in slim outline, here and there, like warriors on the watch. Without these walls,on the Red Square, the only edifice which powerfully conjures up the vanished past is the Church of Vassili the Blessed. Within them, doubtless, there was the same architectural confusion,—the same violent

1 See History of his Captivity, published at Moscow, 1785, by Novikoff.

? Zabielin, Domestic History of the Tsars (Moscow, 1895), pp. 110-118. Oustrialof, History of Peter I. (St. Petersburg, 1858), vol. iv. p- 33-

5 P. Pierling, La Russie et le St. Siège (Paris, 1896), p- 107.

juxtaposition of the German gothic style with those of India, of Byzantium, and of Italy,—the same tangle of edifices, packed one within the other like a Chinese puzzle,—the same strange, wild orgy of decoration, of form, of colour—a delirium and fever, a veritable surfeit of plastic fancy. Small rooms, surbased vaulted roofs, gloomy corridors, lamps twinkling out of the darkness, on the walls the lurid glow of mingled ochres and vermilions, iron bars to every window, armed men at every door; a swarming population of monks and warriors everywhere. The palace rubbed shoulders with the church and the monastery, and was scarcely distinguishable from them. The Sovereign, on his throne, was like the neighbouring relic of some Saint, within its shrine. From one end to the other of that strange accumulation of buildings, sacred and secular dwellings, cathedrals and convents by the score, confused noises,—dulled and stifled by massive walls, thick oriental hangings, and the heavy air imprisoned within them,—rose and fell, their echoes intermingling in a vague harmony of sound. From within the churches sounded the voices of chanting priests; from the ¢evem came the singing of the women—now and again a sharper note would echo from some corner of the palace, scene of a secret orgy, and then a shriller cry, the plaint of some tortured prisoner in his dungeon. But, for the most part, silence reigned; men whispered under their breath ; they stepped carefully, feeling their way. Each one watched his neighbour, and his neighbour him. It was a crypt, a seraglio, a gaol, in one.

This being so, the Kreml was more than the mere residence of the Tsar. All Russia was here concentrated and summed up,—a strange Russia, ten centuries old, and yet an infant; a long historic past behind her, yet standing, apparently, on the threshold of her history. This Russia, severed from her European neighbours, who know her not, yet has European blood of the purest in her veins, her annals teem with European traditions, alliances, relationships, ay, and with traces of a common fate, in good fortune and ill, in victory and disaster.

Between the ninth and tenth centuries, when the earliest French Kings, Charles le Gros and Louis le Bègue, are struggling painfully to defend their treasures from Norman robbers, other Sea Kings land on the Baltic shore. Yonder the Norman, Hrolf, wrests the coast country, called after his race, from Charles the Simple. Here, on the mighty plain that stretches from the Baltic to the Black Sea, among the scanty Finnish or Slavonic population which alone disturbs the solitude, the Norman Rurik and his followers found their Empire.i

À century and a half later, at the three farthest corners of Europe, three heroic leaders affirm the supremacy of the same race, covering it with the common glory of their conquests. In Italy, Robert Guiscard founds the House of Hauteville. William the Conqueror seats himself in England. Jaroslav reigns in Russia.

But this Russia is not the Russia of Moscow. Moscow does not exist, as yet. Jaroslav’s capital is at Kief, a very different place, far nearer to the Western world. Rurik’s descendants, dwelling there, keep up close relations with Greece, with Italy, with Poland, with Germany. Byzantium sends them monks, and learnéd men, and stately prelates. Italy and Germany give them architects, artificers, merchants, and the elements of Roman law. Towards the year 1000, Viadimar, the ‘Red Sun’ of the Rhapsodes, commands his lords to send their children to the schools he has established near the churches; he makes roads, and deposits test weights and measures in the churches. His son Jaroslav (1015- 1054) coins money, builds palaces, adorns the open spaces of his capital with Greek and Latin sculpture, and draws up a code of laws. The five pictures preserved in the Vatican, under the name of the Capponi Collection, are an authentic proof, and a most curious specimen, of Russian art as it flourished at Kief in the twelfth century? The execution is masterly, in no way inferior to the best work of the early Italians, such as Andrea Rico di Candia. And these are not the only signs of culture at Kief. In 1170, at Smolensk, we find the Awzaz, Roman Rostislavitch, busied with learned

1 This conquest, although disputed by Slavaphil historians, would seem to be an undoubted fact. See Soloviefs refutation of Ilovaiski’s opinion (Collected Works on Politics (Bezobrazof, 1879), vol. vii.), and the Studies of Father Martynof (Aevue des Questions Historiques, July 1875. Polybiblion, 1875). Solovief at all events makes the admission—a consoling one to the national vanity—that the Slav tribes submitted voluntarily to a foreign Kxzaz, whom they called to rule over them.

* This collection was presented by Peter the Great to Count Capponi, in acknowledgment of his share in obtaining the signature of a commercial treaty with Genoa.

subjects. He collects libraries, founds schools and seminaries, where the classical languages are taught. From one end to the other of the huge Empire just beginning to take shape, between the Don and the Carpathians, the Volga and the Dvina, a busy trade is already carried on with Europe— western, southern, and northern. Novgorod commands the commerce of the Baltic. At Kief a motley crowd of merchants—Norman, Slav, Hungarian, Venetian, Genoese, German, Arab, and Jew—fill the streets, and deal in every kind of product. In 1028 there were a dozen markets in the city. And these Dukes of Kief have no need to seek their wives within their subjects’ #erems. Jaroslav espouses a Swede, Ingegard, the daughter of King Olaf. He marries his sister to King Casimir of Poland; one of his sons, Vsievolod, to the daughter of the Emperor Constantine Monomachus of Byzantium; another, Viatcheslaf, to a Countess of Stade; a third, Igor, to Kunigunde, Countess of Orlamiinde. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, weds King Harold of Norway ; the third, Anastasia, King Andreas 1. of Hungary. Three Bishops, Gautier de Meaux, Gosselin de Chalignac, and Roger de Châlons, come to Kief, in 1048, to ask the hand of the second daughter, Anne, for Henry 1. of France.

Before the middle of the thirteenth century all this crumbles and disappears, leaving no trace behind. The Empire had not as yet really found its feet: it was not founded upon the rock, firm to withstand any violent shock. Dukes of Kief, of Novgorod, of Smolensk, though they were, these Rurikovitch, in spite of their union of warlike instinct with very remarkable organising powers, bore about with them the brand of their origin—a ferment of disorder and violence, from which nothing but the action of time, bringing with it long established submission to the customs of civilised societies, and the laws of a strongly organised State, could have delivered them. Time played them false. The blow came in 1224, when Baty, with his Mongol hordes, appeared upon the scene. At that moment, after some attempt, early in the twelfth century, at concentration, under Vladimir Monomachus, sixty petty princes were quarrelling over scraps of power and rags of sovereignty between the Volga and the Bug. Baty and Mangu, a grandson of Gengis Khan, forced them into reconciliation.

Centuries of endeavour and of civilising effort were thus to disappear into the dust raised by the hoofs of a hundred thousand horses. Of ancient Russia, Europeanised, indeed, by its conquerors, but in no sense denationalised,—thanks to the rapid absorption of the scanty Norman element—not a trace remained. In the following century, between 1319 and 1340, Kief and the neighbouring countries fell into the hands of the future Kings of Poland, still Dukes of Lithuania.

After the reign of Giedymine, Jagellon, annexing all the fragments of the ephemeral sovereignty of Monomachus— Red Russia, White Russia, Black Russia, Little Russia—to the new Polish-Lithuanian Empire, wielded the sceptre of ‘all the Russias,—as the time-honoured formula now runs. And the countries he annexed were little more than deserts. At this moment the history of the Rurikovitch sovereignty seems utterly closed.

But it springs up afresh, eastward of the huge space marked out by Fate as the dwelling-place of an innumerable population, and the scene of an immeasurable development. In the upper basin of the Volga, on the banks of the Moskva, in the midst of a sparse Finnish population, a poor village, overlooked by a strong fortified castle, had, since the twelfth century, been the home and appanage of one of the descendants of Rurik. Destroyed, more than once, in the course of incessant warfare with its Rurikovitch neighbours, swept by the wave of invading Mongols, this village raised its head again and again, increased in size, and, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, already formed the nucleus of a fresh agglomeration of Norman, Siav, and Finnish elements. Taking docile submission to the yoke of the Asiatic conquerors for his rule, the Auzzaz of Moscow ended by making that yoke serve as an organising instrument, useful alike for internal government, and external expansion. Humbly, patiently, adroitly, he undertook the duties of an intermediary—welcomed by one side for his usefulness, endured by the other as a necessity—between the conquerors and the conquered ; stooping to play the part of tax-collector for the common master, of police agent, of executioner, if need be. Extending and strengthening, by slow degrees, the superiority thus dearly bought, the wily Azzaz succeeded each other, until the day should come—long waited, carefully prepared—when one should be strong enough to break the infamous compact, which had served him and his forebears as a tool for their own emancipation.