actual contact, the only point without natural protection
between Russia and Europe, and it must be guarded. German merchants,
hand in hand with Latin missionaries, invaded a strip of disputed
territory, and, under the cloak of Christianity, commenced
a--_conquest_. A Latin Church became also a fortress; and the fortress
soon expanded into a German town, and these crept every year farther
and farther into the East. In order to quell the resistance of native
Finns and Slavs, there was created, and authorized by the Pope, an
order of knighthood, called the "Sword-Bearers," with the double
purpose of driving back the Slavonic tide which threatened Germany and
at the same time Christianizing it. These were the "Livonian Knights,"
who came from Saxony and Westphalia, armed _cap-a-pie_, with red
crosses embroidered upon the shoulder of their white mantles. Then
another order was created (1225), the "Teutonic Order," wearing black
crosses on their shoulders, which, after fraternizing with the Livonian
Knights, was going to absorb them--together with some other
things--into their own more powerful organization. Russia had no armed
warriors to meet these steel-clad Germans and Livonians. She had no
orders of chivalry, had taken no part in the Crusades, the far-off
echoes of which had fallen upon unheeding ears. The Russians could
defend with desperate courage their own flimsy fortifications of wood,
earth, and loose stones; but they could not pull down with ropes the
solid German fortresses of stone and cement, and their spears were
ineffectual upon the shining armor. Their conquest was inevitable; the
conquered territory being divided between the knights and the Latin
Church. So Koenigsberg and many other Russian towns were captured and
then Teutonized, by joining them to the cities of Lubeck, Bremen,
Hamburg, etc., in the "Hanseatic League."

This conquest was of less future importance to Russia than to Western
Europe. It contained the germ of much history. The territory thus
wrested from Russia became the German state of Prussia; and a future
master of the Teutonic order, a Hohenzollern, was in later years its
first King; and this was the beginning of the great German Empire which
confronts the Empire of the Czar to-day.

So the conquest by the German Orders was added to the other woes by
which Russia was rent and torn after the death of her Grand Prince at
Suzdal. To us it all seems like an unmeaning panorama