8. Notes sur Villehardouin,
p. 296-299.) See likewise the annotations of Reiske to the Ceremoniale
Aulae Byzant. of Constantine, tom. ii. p. 149, 150. Saxo Grammaticus
affirms that they spoke Danish; but Codinus maintains them till the
fifteenth century in the use of their native English.]

In the tenth century, the geography of Scythia was extended far beyond
the limits of ancient knowledge; and the monarchy of the Russians
obtains a vast and conspicuous place in the map of Constantine. [49]
The sons of Ruric were masters of the spacious province of Wolodomir,
or Moscow; and, if they were confined on that side by the hordes of the
East, their western frontier in those early days was enlarged to the
Baltic Sea and the country of the Prussians. Their northern reign
ascended above the sixtieth degree of latitude over the Hyperborean
regions, which fancy had peopled with monsters, or clouded with eternal
darkness. To the south they followed the course of the Borysthenes,
and approached with that river the neighborhood of the Euxine Sea. The
tribes that dwelt, or wandered, in this ample circuit were obedient to
the same conqueror, and insensibly blended into the same nation. The
language of Russia is a dialect of the Sclavonian; but in the tenth
century, these two modes of speech were different from each other; and,
as the Sclavonian prevailed in the South, it may be presumed that the
original Russians of the North, the primitive subjects of the Varangian
chief, were a portion of the Fennic race. With the emigration, union, or
dissolution, of the wandering tribes, the loose and indefinite picture
of the Scythian desert has continually shifted. But the most ancient
map of Russia affords some places which still retain their name and
position; and the two capitals, Novogorod [50] and Kiow, [51] are coeval
with the first age of the monarchy. Novogorod had not yet deserved
the epithet of great, nor the alliance of the Hanseatic League, which
diffused the streams of opulence and the principles of freedom. Kiow
could not yet boast of three hundred churches, an innumerable people,
and a degree of greatness and splendor which was compared with
Constantinople by those who had never seen the residence of the Caesars.
In their origin, the two cities were no more than camps or fairs, the
most convenient stations in which the Barbarians might assemble for the
occasional business of war or trade. Yet even these assemblies announce
some pr