and continued on either
side with planks, till it attained the length of sixty, and the height
of about twelve, feet. These boats were built without a deck, but with
two rudders and a mast; to move with sails and oars; and to contain from
forty to seventy men, with their arms, and provisions of fresh water
and salt fish. The first trial of the Russians was made with two hundred
boats; but when the national force was exerted, they might arm against
Constantinople a thousand or twelve hundred vessels. Their fleet was not
much inferior to the royal navy of Agamemnon, but it was magnified in
the eyes of fear to ten or fifteen times the real proportion of its
strength and numbers. Had the Greek emperors been endowed with foresight
to discern, and vigor to prevent, perhaps they might have sealed with a
maritime force the mouth of the Borysthenes. Their indolence abandoned
the coast of Anatolia to the calamities of a piratical war, which, after
an interval of six hundred years, again infested the Euxine; but as
long as the capital was respected, the sufferings of a distant province
escaped the notice both of the prince and the historian. The storm which
had swept along from the Phasis and Trebizond, at length burst on
the Bosphorus of Thrace; a strait of fifteen miles, in which the rude
vessels of the Russians might have been stopped and destroyed by a more
skilful adversary. In their first enterprise under the princes of Kiow,
they passed without opposition, and occupied the port of Constantinople
in the absence of the emperor Michael, the son of Theophilus. Through
a crowd of perils, he landed at the palace-stairs, and immediately
repaired to a church of the Virgin Mary. By the advice of the patriarch,
her garment, a precious relic, was drawn from the sanctuary and dipped
in the sea; and a seasonable tempest, which determined the retreat of
the Russians, was devoutly ascribed to the mother of God. The silence
of the Greeks may inspire some doubt of the truth, or at least of the
importance, of the second attempt by Oleg, the guardian of the sons
of Ruric. A strong barrier of arms and fortifications defended the
Bosphorus: they were eluded by the usual expedient of drawing the boats
over the isthmus; and this simple operation is described in the national
chronicles, as if the Russian fleet had sailed over dry land with a
brisk and favorable gale. The leader of the third armament, Igor, the
son of Ruric, had chosen a moment of we