e former
lords of Kief, he looked with greedy and envious eyes.

For long centuries past Greece and the other countries of the South had
paid little heed to the dwellers on the Russian plains, of whose
scattered tribes they had no fear. But with the coming of the
Varangians, the conquest of the tribes, and the founding of a
wide-spread empire, a different state of affairs began, and from that
day to this Constantinople has found the people of the steppes its most
dangerous and persistent foes.

Oleg was not long in making the Greek empire feel his heavy hand.
Filling the minds of his followers and subjects with his own thirst for
blood and plunder, he set out with an army of eighty thousand men, in
two thousand barks, passed the cataracts of the Borysthenes, crossed the
Black Sea, murdered the subjects of the empire in hosts, and, as the
chronicles say, sailed overland with all sails set to the port of
Constantinople itself. What he probably did was to have his vessels
taken over a neck of land on wheels or rollers.

Here he threw the imperial city into mortal terror, fixed his shield on
the very gate of Constantinople, and forced the emperor to buy him off
at the price of an enormous ransom. To the treaty made the Varangian
warriors swore by their gods Perune and Voloss, by their rings, and by
their swords,--gold and steel, the things they honored most and most
desired.

Then back in triumph they sailed to Kief, rich with booty, and ever
after hailing their leader as the Wise Man, or Magician. Eight years
afterwards Oleg made a treaty of alliance and commerce with
Constantinople, in which Greeks and Russians stood on equal footing.
Russia had made a remarkable stride forward as a nation since Rurik was
invited to Novgorod a quarter-century before.

For thirty-three years Oleg held the throne. His was too strong a hand
to yield its power to his ward. Igor must wait for Oleg's death. He had
found a province; he left an empire. In his hands Russia grew into
greatness, and from Novgorod to Kief and far and wide to the right and
left stretched the lands won by his conquering sword.

He was too great a man to die an ordinary death. According to the
tradition, miracle had to do with his passing away. Nestor, the prince
of Russian chroniclers, tells us the following story:

Oleg had a favorite horse, which he rode alike in battle and in the
hunt, until at length a prediction came from the soothsayers that death
would