Читать книгу The Romance of the Romanoffs - Joseph McCabe - Страница 8

Even Novgorod, we saw, felt the heavy hand of Andrew of Vladimir, and the remainder of Russia steadily lost its vitality under the drain of civil war. Upon this distracted and enfeebled population there now fell an autocratic ruler of the most arbitrary character. The year 1237 is, in the chronicles, one of calamities and portents. The fires which so often devoured the timber settlements of the Slavs were more numerous and destructive than ever. Drought and famine made haggard faces over large regions, and from the sky a terrifying eclipse and other portents seemed to mock their prayers for deliverance. As the dreadful year passed a new evil broke upon them. Into the southern principalities poured crowds of fugitives from the east, who told that immense hordes of ferocious and inhuman horsemen were covering the land and completing its desolation. Toward the close of the year the first wave of the Tatars shook the southern frontiers of the Slavs.

Asia had, as well as Europe, its adventurers, and the baleful dream of conquest had lit the imagination of a Tatar chief, Dchingis Khan, amidst the dreary wastes of Siberia. Gathering about him the rough tribes of his race, a swarm of hardy shepherds who knew not what a house, much less a city, was, he led them against the civilisation of the south. His men lived in the saddle, and each was a master in the use of the bow, the sabre, and the lance. Camels and buffaloes bore their (at first) scanty possessions, and they moved with all the speed of devouring nomads. The villages of Manchuria, the tame and placid cities of China, and all the wide spaces of central Asia were successively overrun and forced to pay tribute. From the civilised Chinese the wonderful and profoundly ignorant barbarian quickly learned the art of gathering taxes and enjoying luxury, and he moved further west in a vague design of conquering the earth.

This strange and terrifying horde, a cloud of fiercely yelling centaurs with troops of animals which no Russian had ever seen, first fell upon the southern Russians in 1224. Their method was to press the peasantry into their service and attempt to disarm the towns with hollow assurances of friendship, but, in whatever way the town was taken, there followed a merciless slaughter and a thorough pillage. The Russians, alarmed by the reports of the outlying tribes, sent out a great army to meet the Mongols on the steppes, and were crushingly defeated. The Mongols had, however, retired to Asia, where their dominion was not solidly established, and it was a vaster army, under a new Khan, that appeared in the south of Russia in 1237.

From 1237 to 1240 the Khan Batu led his army of 600,000 men, with appalling destruction, across the various principalities of Russia. Weakened by their feuds, severed by their selfish rivalries, the various provinces fell one by one under the feet of the merciless invaders. Rape, murder, fire, and pillage were the invariable sequels of success. The Russians appealed to the nations of the nearer west to help them to dam this Asiatic flood, but the Latin Christians were not minded to stir themselves for semi-barbarians who did not respect the Pope. When the Khan passed over the prostrate body of Russia and advanced still further, in his determination to conquer an earth of which he knew less than a child in a modern infant-school, the Poles and Hungarians at length spread their barrier of steel across his path. But the check did not now profit Russia. Batu retired upon Russia, built a city, Sarai, on the banks of the Volga (beyond the limits of the principalities), and began a life of organised parasitism upon the unfortunate people. The comparative unity brought about by their Norse defenders had prepared the way for the Khan. The Khan was to prepare the way for the Moscovite.

Again we may ignore the crowded details, the rise and fall and eternal feuds of petty princes, of the Russian chronicle. What matters is that the entire country which was then known as Russia was overspread by a network of tax-gatherers, and the people learned to tremble at the commands of a distant autocrat. At Sarai the Mongols established a court of barbaric magnificence, and this in time declared itself independent of the Tatar Empire in Asia and sought the nourishment of its luxury in Russia. The western sovereignty came to be known throughout Europe as the Golden Horde, and the western nations heard with indifference the cynical extravagance and the occasional brutality with which it treated schismatic Slavs.

No prince could now don his tattered dignity in Russia without the august permission of the semi-civilised ruler on the Volga, and a system was soon evolved which enabled the courtiers and concubines of the Khan to share the good fortune of their lord. In the constant disputes about succession claimants to the various Slav principalities made the perilous journey to Sarai, and the richness of the presents they brought sufficed to illumine the obscurity of their titles. Occasionally a prince whose loyalty to the Mongols was suspected was summoned to Sarai, and not a few who could not pass the humiliating tests left their bones among the Mohammedan Tatars. To those who bent their backs or tendered the cup with servile respect the Khan was gracious. They returned with power to extort the taxes for the Tatars and a large additional sum for themselves. If their people or rival princes were restive, a troop of the dreaded Tatar horse was put at their disposal, and the lash and the sabre cowed every attempt at revolt. The spying and flogging with which the servants of the Khan protected their master’s interests were copied by the Slav-Norse princes. The Byzantine civilisation had itself introduced many devices of autocratic barbarism, for the jails of Constantinople, especially the dungeons of the superb imperial palace, witnessed ghastly tortures and mutilations. The cruelty of the Asiatic completed this machinery of the later Tsars; and the Princes of Moscow were the readiest of all to be the tax-gatherers of the Khan and the pupils of his unscrupulous ministers.

The scattered Slavs had, after the three or four years of terror, returned from the forests to their burned villages and their plundered towns. The gold and silver had gone from their churches: the inmates of their nunneries were the playthings of the Asiatic officers: their democracy was a mockery. Their industry soon healed the torn face of the country, but lands and lives now belonged to the foreign master. One-tenth of all their produce must be paid in taxes, and they might at any time be summoned to do military service. Kieff was in large part a ruin; Suzdal, Moscow, Riazan, and other cities were despoiled. Even Novgorod and Pskoff had, after a bloody resistance, to present their fleece to the shearer.

The miserable condition of the Slavs was further darkened by the behaviour of their Christian neighbours on the west. The Swedes, pleading that the men of Novgorod hindered the conversion to the true faith of the remaining pagans of the north, induced the Pope to declare a holy crusade, with the customary spiritual and temporal advantages, against Russia, and a zealous army advanced against Novgorod. It was shattered, but the Catholic zeal of the west was not extinguished. The Knights of the Sword, the German order which enforced baptism as truculently as the early Mohammedans had enforced the Koran, next appeared on the Russian frontier, and took Pskoff. The Teutonic adventurers were not less formidable in white mantle and red cross than they had been in the dress of the pagan Norsemen, and were hardly less ferocious, but they had to retreat before the stalwart Novgorodians. In the fourteenth century, however, the united Lithuanians and Poles crossed into Russia and added to the miseries of the people. Only half a dozen of the Russian principalities could hold out against the invaders. The Tatars were now in decay, and the red spears of the Lithuanian knights were even seen as far south as the Black Sea.

It is to this demoralisation of the Russians rather than to any direct Tatar influence that we must turn our attention. There was little mingling of Mongol and Slav blood, beyond the occasional marriage of a Tatar princess by some sycophantic prince, and the enslavement of Russian women in the spacious harems of the Asiatics. “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar” is an untruth. Few races in the civilised world are purer in blood than the Russian Slavs. Nor did the Khans modify the Russian culture more than the levying of tribute demanded. With the clergy they were on friendly terms, knowing their power over the ignorant peasants, and they suppressed neither the Mir of the village nor the Véché of the town, as long as it furnished the collective tribute. On the other hand, they entirely broke the original spirit of independence; they organised the country for purposes of extortion, and disorganised it for purposes of self-defence; they helped to convert the brutal and masterful Norseman into a calculating and coldly selfish prince; and they encouraged the subjection of women which the teaching of the Byzantian priests and monks had begun.