Andrew's third successor resigns even the last shadow of
supremacy, the title of Grand Prince, and the merely nominal homage
still offered him. The appanages to the South and to the West become by
turns Lithuanian, Polish, Hungarian, Livonian, Swedish. Kiev itself, the
ancient capital, follows destinies of its own, after having dwindled
down from a seat of the Grand Princedom to the territory of a city.
Thus, the Russia of the Normans completely disappears from the stage,
and the few weak reminiscences in which it still outlived itself,
dissolve before the terrible apparition of Genghis Khan. The bloody mire
of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the
cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.

The Tartar yoke lasted from 1237 to 1462--more than two centuries; a
yoke not only crushing, but dishonouring and withering the very soul of
the people that fell its prey. The Mongol Tartars established a rule of
systematic terror, devastation and wholesale massacre forming its
institutions. Their numbers being scanty in proportion to their enormous
conquests, they wanted to magnify them by a halo of consternation, and
to thin, by wholesale slaughter, the populations which might rise in
their rear. In their creations of desert they were, besides, led by the
same economical principle which has depopulated the Highlands of
Scotland and the Campagna di Roma--the conversion of men into sheep, and
of fertile lands and populous abodes into pasturage.

The Tartar yoke had already lasted a hundred years before Muscovy
emerged from its obscurity. To entertain discord among the Russian
princes, and secure their servile submission, the Mongols had restored
the dignity of the Grand Princedom. The strife among the Russian princes
for this dignity was, as a modern author has it, "an abject strife--the
strife of slaves, whose chief weapon was calumny, and who were always
ready to denounce each other to their cruel rulers; wrangling for a
degraded throne, whence they could not move but with plundering,
parricidal hands--hands filled with gold and stained with gore; which
they dared not ascend without grovelling, nor retain but on their knees,
prostrate and trembling beneath the scimitar of a Tartar, always ready
to roll under his feet those servile crowns, and the heads by which they
were worn." It was in this infamous strife that the Moscow branch won at
last the race. In 1328 the crown o