o the
civilizing center at Constantinople, should absorb the life currents.
All of Russia was to be vitalized; the bleak North as well as the
South; the zone of the forests as well as the fertile steppes. The
instruments appointed to accomplish this great work were--the disorder
consequent upon the reapportionment of the territory at the death of
each sovereign--the fierce rivalries of ambitious Princes--and the
barbaric encroachments to which the prevailing anarchy made the South
the prey.

By the twelfth century the civil war had become distinctly a war
between a new Russia of the forests and the old Russia of the fertile
steppes. The cause of the North had a powerful leader in Andrew
Bogoliubski. Andrew was the grandson of Monomakh and the son of Yuri
(or George) Dolgoruki--both of whom were Grand Princes of extraordinary
abilities and commanding qualities. In 1169 Andrew, who was then
Prince of Suzdal, came with an immense army of followers; he marched
against Kief. The "Mother of Russian Cities" was taken by assault,
sacked and pillaged, and the Grand Principality ceased to exist.
Russia was preparing to revolve around a new center in the Northeast;
and with the new Grand Principality of Suzdal, far removed from
Byzantine and Western civilizations, it looked like a return toward
barbarism, but was in fact the circuitous road to progress. The life
of the nation needed to be drawn to its extremities, and the ambitious
Andrew, who assumed the title and authority of Grand Prince, had
established a line which was destined to lead to the Czars of future
Russia.

CHAPTER VI

GERMAN INVASION--MONGOL INVASION

The Principality of Novgorod had from a remote antiquity been the
political center of Northern, as was Kief of Southern Russia. It was
the Novgorodians who invited the Norse Princes to come and rule the
land; and it was the Novgorodians who were their least submissive
subjects. When one of the Grand Princes proposed to send his son, whom
they did not want, to be their Prince, they replied: "Send him here if
he has a spare head." It was a fearless, proud republic, as patriotic
and as quarrelsome as Florence, which it somewhat resembled. Their
Prince was in reality a figurehead. He was considered essential to the
dignity of the state, but his fortunes were in the hands of two
political parties, of which he represented the party in the ascendant.
Novgorod was a commercial city--its life was in its