History of Russia

The Roman Church, intrenched behind its secular power, and furnished with the keys of heaven and earth, armed with the thunderbolt of excommunication, and counting kings and emperors its humble vassals, was able to help the Spaniards in their struggle with the Moors or to lead crusades against the impious Turks. Russia, on the other hand, was left to grapple single-handed with the barbarian hordes of Asia. The princes of the Roman faith were dependent upon the Pope for their crowns; the higher classes of European society were sharply marked from the lower by their knowledge of the church language, the Latin tongue. In Russia the Church was independent of the civil power, was purely national; its services were conducted in a language known as well to the peasant as to the grand prince.

The Greek religion gave the Russian princes an idea of royal power which finally reached its full development in the tsars of Moscow. The princes of Kief were by no means sovereigns in the modern sense of the word, but rather powerful chiefs of bands who at any time were free to leave them and take service elsewhere. But the priests from Constantinople brought a new ideal: this was the emperor, "the heir of Augustus and Constantine the Great, the Vicar of God on earth, the typical monarch on whom the eyes of the barbarians of Gaul, as well as those of Scythia, were fixed."

POPE SYLVESTER II.

"He did not consider his states as an inheritance to be divided among his children, but handed over to his successor the empire in its entireness. His power came to him not only from the people but from God himself; his imperial ornaments like his person had a sacred character, and if ever the barbarian kings came to Constantinople and begged for one of his jewelled crowns, his purple robe, his sceptre, or his brodekins, their answer was that when God gave the empire to Constantine he sent these vestments by the angels, that they were not the work of man, that they were laid upon the altar and worn by the emperor himself only on solemn occasions, and that Leo the Kozar was visited with a mortal ulcer because he put on the crown without the Patriarch's permission."

Whatever advantages of morals or civilization Christianity brought in its train, it did not secure the blessings of peace. The hundred and seventy years from the death of Fiery Fame till the Tartar invasion were filled with a varying succession of domestic and foreign wars. During this time sixty-four states rose and fell, two hundred and ninety-three princes disputed the throne of Kief, eighty-three civil wars wasted the country, and innumerable campaigns were fought with the barbarians. As the ruin of the civilized empire of the Kozars broke the barriers against the Petchenegs, so Fiery Fame's defeat of the Petchenegs opened the way for the Kumans, who alone invaded Russia forty-six times during these troublous years. The end of the world seemed to be at hand: there were terrible disasters on every side; fires, earthquakes, eclipses, comets, famines, and locusts. The chronicle says:—

"Cities were deserted; you might see on all sides villages on fire, churches, houses, barns, reduced to ash-heaps, and the wretched citizens either dying beneath the lashes of their enemies, or waiting death with horror. Prisoners, barefoot and naked, were dragged in chains to the far-off lands of the savages, and they said to one another, weeping, 'I am from such a Russian village, and I am from such a city.' On our plains no more cattle or horses were to be seen; the fields were full of weeds, and wild beasts ranged the places where Christians had lately dwelt."

If Greece and Switzerland by their mountains and valleys are countries meant by nature to be cut up into petty kingdoms or principalities, Russia, composed of one vast plain with hills nowhere more than three hundred and sixty meters above the level of the sea, and crossed by great rivers, those "roads that run," was equally fitted to be one united empire. That this empire was not sooner formed was due to the custom of the princes to divide their domain among all their sons. During the two centuries of family quarrels which followed Fiery Fame's death, Kief, "the mother of Russian cities," continued to be a goal for the ambition of all the descendants of Rurik. The Prince of Kief was the grand prince, and according to the Eastern or patriarchal idea the eldest of the family, whether uncle, brother, or son, always claimed the fair city as his seat; it was there that Olga and Oleg had gloriously reigned, that St. Vladimir had held his epic court, that Fiery Fame had built his numberless churches with their golden domes.