unceasingly striving, through Germany and
Poland, to carry the Latin cross into Russia. Again and again had the
Greek Church repulsed the offers of reconciliation and union made by
Rome. So, much was hoped from the proselyting of the German Orders,
and of Catholic Poland, and from the union effected by the marriage of
the Lithuanian Prince Iagello with the Polish Queen Hedwig.

The threads composing this network of policies in the West were
altogether ecclesiastical, until Lithuania began to feel strong enough
to wash off her Christian baptism and to indulge in ambitious designs
of her own: to struggle away from Poland, and to commence an
independent and aggressive movement against Russia.

There was an immense vigor in this movement. The power in the West,
sometimes Catholic and at heart always pagan, absorbed first towns and
cities and then principalities. It began to be a Lithuanian conquest,
and overshadowed even Mongol oppression. The Mongol wanted tribute;
while Lithuania wanted Russia! But one of the gravest dangers brought
by this war between the East and the West was the standing opportunity
it offered to conspirators. An army of disaffected uncles and nephews
and brothers, with their followers, could always find a refuge, and
were always plotting and intriguing and negotiating with Lithuania and
Poland, ready even to compromise their faith, if only they might ruin
the existing powers.

Such, in brief, was the great conflict between the East and West,
during which Moscow came into being as the supreme head, the living
center and germ of Russian autocracy.

It seems to have been the extraordinary vitality of one family which
twice changed the currents of national life: first drawing them from
Kief to Suzdal, then from Suzdal toward Moscow, and there establishing
a center of growth which has expanded into Russia as it exists to-day.
This was the family of _Dolgoruki_. Monomakh and his son George
Dolgoruki, the last Grand Prince of Kief, were both men of commanding
character and abilities; and it will be remembered that it was Andrew
Bogoliubski, the son of George (or Yuri), who effected the revolution
which transferred the Grand Principality from Kief to Suzdal in the
bleak North. Alexander Nevski, the hero of the Neva and of Novgorod,
was the descendant of this Andrew (of Suzdal), and it was the son of
Nevski who was the first Prince of Moscow and who there established a
line of Princes which has co