Bati continued his career of conquest, and, in 1245, was almost undisputed master of Russia, of many of the Polish provinces, of Hungary, Croatia, Servia, Bulgaria on the Danube, Moldavia and Wallachia.  He then returned to the Volga and established himself there as permanent monarch over all these subjugated realms.  No one dared to resist him.  Bati sent a haughty message to the Grand Prince Yaroslaf at northern Vladimir, ordering him to come to his camp on the distant Volga.  Yaroslaf, in the position in which he found himself—­Russia being exhausted, depopulated, covered with ruins and with graves—­did not dare disobey.  Accompanied by several of his nobles, he took the weary journey, and humbly presented himself in the tent of the conqueror.  Bati compelled the humiliated prince to send his young son, Constantin, to Tartary, to the palace of the grand khan Octai, who was about to celebrate, with his chiefs, the brilliant conquests his army had made in China and Europe.  If the statements of the annalists of those days may be credited, so sumptuous a fete the world had never seen before.  The guests, assembled in the metropolis of the khan, were innumerable.  Yaroslaf was compelled to promise allegiance to the Tartar chieftain, and all the other Russian princes, who had survived the general slaughter, were also forced to pay homage and tribute to Bati.

After two years, the young prince, Constantin, returned from Tartary, and then Yaroslaf himself was ordered, with all his relatives, to go to the capital of this barbaric empire on the banks of the Amour, where the Tartar chiefs were to meet to choose a successor to Octai, who had recently died.  With tears the unhappy prince bade adieu to his country, and, traversing vast deserts and immense regions of hills and valleys, he at length reached the metropolis of his cruel masters.  Here he successfully defended himself against some accusations which had been brought against him, and, after a detention of several months, he was permitted to set out on his return.  He had proceeded but a few hundred miles on the weary journey when he was taken sick, and died the 20th of September, 1246.  The faithful nobles who accompanied him bore his remains to Vladimir, where they were interred.

There was no longer a Russian kingdom.  The country had lost its independence; and the Tartar sway, rude, vacillating and awfully cruel, extended from remote China to the shores of the Baltic.  The Roman, Grecian and Russian empires thus crumbling, the world was threatened with an universal inundation of barbarism.  Russian princes, with more or less power ruled over the serfs who tilled their lands, but there was no recognized head of the once powerful kingdom, and no Russian prince ventured to disobey the commands even of the humblest captain of the Tartar hordes.

While affairs were in this deplorable state, a Russian prince, Daniel, of Gallicia, engaged secretly, but with great vigor, in the attempt to secure the cooeperation of the rest of Europe to emancipate Russia from the Tartar yoke.  Greece, overawed by the barbarians, did not dare to make any hostile movement against them.  Daniel turned to Rome, and promised the pope, Innocent IV., that Russia should return to the Roman church, and would march under the papal flag if the pope would rouse Christian Europe against the Tartars.