nd by
the success of his arms, rapidly extended his authority. But again the
awful plague swept Russia. The annalists of those days thus describe
the symptoms and the character of the malady:

"One felt himself suddenly struck as by a knife plunged into the heart
through the shoulder blades or between the two shoulders. An intense
fire seemed to burn the entrails; blood flowed freely from the throat;
a violent perspiration ensued, followed by severe chills; tumors
gathered upon the neck, the hip, under the arms or behind the shoulder
blades. The end was invariably the same--death, inevitable, speedy,
but terrible."

Out of a hundred persons, frequently not more than ten would be left
alive. Moscow was almost depopulated. In Smolensk but five individuals
escaped, and they were compelled to abandon the city, the houses and
the streets being encumbered with the putrefying bodies of the
dead.[2] Just before this disaster, Moscow suffered severely from a
conflagration. The imperial palace and a large portion of the city
were laid in ashes. The prince then resolved to construct a Kremlin of
stone, and he laid the foundations of a gorgeous palace in the year
1367.

[Footnote 2: See Histoire de l'Empire de Russie, par M. Karamsin.
Traduite par MM. St. Thomas et Jauffret. Tome cinquieme, p. 10.]

Dmitri now began to bid defiance to the Tartars, doubly weakened by
the sweep of the pestilence and by internal discord. There were a few
minor conflicts, in which the Russians were victorious, and, elated by
success, they began to rally for a united effort to shake off the
degrading Mogol yoke. Three bands of the Tartars were encamped at the
mouth of the Dnieper. The Russians descended the river in barges,
assailed them with the valor which their fathers had displayed, and
drove the pagans, in wild rout, to the shores of the Sea of Azof.

The Tartars, astounded at such unprecedented audacity, forgetting, for
the time, their personal animosities, collected a large army, and
commenced a march upon Moscow. The grand prince dispatched his
couriers in every direction to assemble the princes of the empire with
all the soldiers they could bring into the field. Again the Tartars
were repulsed. For many years the Tartars had been in possession of
Bulgaria, an extensive region east of the Volga. In the year 1376, the
grand prince, Dmitri, fitted out an expedition for the reconquest of
that country. The Russian arms were signally successful