help in the North.  His two sons were charged with the defence of the capital.  Princes and boyars, feeling there was no alternative but death or servitude, prepared to die.  The princesses and all the nobles prayed Bishop Metrophanes to give them the tonsure; and when the Tartars rushed into the town by all its gates, the vanquished retired into the cathedral, where they perished, men and women, in a general conflagration.  Suzdal, Rostoff, Yaroslavl, fourteen towns, and a multitude of villages in the grand principality were also given over to the flames, 1238.  The Tartars then went to seek the Grand Prince, who was encamped on the Sit, almost on the frontier of the possessions of Novgorod.

George II could neither avenge his people nor his family.  After the battle, the Bishop of Rostoff found his headless corpse.  His nephew, Vassilko, who was taken prisoner, was stabbed for refusing to serve Batu.  The immense Tartar army, after having sacked Tver, took Torjok; there “the Russian heads fell beneath the sword of the Tartars as grass beneath the scythe.”  The territory of Novgorod was invaded; the great republic trembled, but the deep forests and the swollen rivers delayed Batu.  The invading flood reached the Cross of Ignatius, about fifty miles from Novgorod, then returned to the southeast.  On the way the small town of Kozelsk (near Kaluga) checked the Tartars for so long, and inflicted on them so much loss, that it was called by them the “wicked town.”  Its population was exterminated, and the prince Vassili, still a child, was “drowned in blood.”

The two following years, 1239-1240, were spent by the Tartars in ravaging Southern Russia.  They burned Pereiaslaf and Tchernigoff, defended with desperation by its princes.  Next Mangu, grandson of Genghis Khan, marched against the famous town of Kiev, whose name resounded through the East and in the books of the Arab writers.  From the left bank of the Dnieper, the barbarian admired the great city on the heights of the right bank, towering over the wide river with her white walls and towers adorned by Byzantine artists, and innumerable churches with cupolas of gold and silver.  Mangu proposed capitulation to the Kievians; the fate of Riazan, of Tchernigof, of Vladimir, the capitals of powerful states, announced to them the lot that awaited them in case of refusal, yet the Kievians dared to massacre the envoys of the Khan.  Michael, their Grand Prince, fled; his rival, Daniel of Galitch, did not care to remain.

On hearing the report of Mangu, Batu came to assault Kiev with the bulk of his army.  The grinding of the wooden chariots, the bellowings of the buffaloes, the cries of the camels, the neighing of the horses, the howlings of the Tartars rendered it impossible, says the annalist, to hear your own voice in the town.  The Tartars assailed the Polish Gate and knocked down the walls with a battering-ram.  The Kievians, supported by the brave Dmitri, a Galician boyar, defended