cue, the
Mongols sent messengers saying: "We have no quarrel with you; we have
come to destroy the accursed Polovtsui." The Princes replied by
promptly putting the ambassadors all to death. This sealed the fate of
Russia. There could be no compromise after that. Upon that first
battlefield, on the steppes near the sea of Azof, there were left six
Princes, seventy chief _boyars_, and all but one-tenth of the Russian
army.

After this thunderbolt had fallen an ominous quiet reigned for thirteen
years. Nothing more was heard of the Mongols--but a comet blazing in
the sky awoke vague fears. Suddenly an army of five hundred thousand
Asiatics returned, led by Batui, nephew of the Great Khan of Khans.

It was the defective political structure of Russia, its division into
principalities, which made it an easy prey. The Mongols, moving as one
man, took one principality at a time, its nobles and citizens alone
bearing arms, the peasants, by far the greater part, being utterly
defenseless. After wrecking and devastating that, they passed on to
the next, which, however desperately defended, met the same fate. The
Grand Principality was a ruin; its fourteen towns were burned, and
when, in the absence of its Grand Prince, Vladimir the capital city
fell, the Princesses and all the families of the nobles took refuge in
the cathedral and perished in the general conflagration (1238). Two
years later Kief also fell, with its white walls and towers embellished
by Byzantine art, its cupolas of gold and silver. All was laid in the
dust, and only a few fragments in museums now remain to tell of its
glory. The annalist describes the bellowings of the buffaloes, the
cries of the camels, the neighing of the horses, and howlings of the
Tatars while the ancient and beautiful city was being laid low.

Before 1240 the work was complete. There was a Mongol empire where had
been a Russian. Then the tide began to set toward Western Europe.
Isolated from the other European states by her religion, Russia had
suffered alone. No Europe sprang to her defense as to the defense of
Spain from the Saracens. Not until Poland and Hungary were threatened
and invaded did the Western Kingdoms give any sign of interest. Then
the Pope, in alarm, appealed to the Christian states. Frederick II. of
Germany responded, and Louis IX. of France (Saint-Louis) prepared to
lead a crusade. But the storm had spent its fury upon the Slavonic
people, and was c