paid but little attention to the paper edict.  Immediately the Russian princes arrayed themselves on different sides.  The conflict was short, but decisive, and the victorious prince of Moscow was crowned as sovereign.  The light of a resurrection morning was now dawning upon the Russian monarchy.  There were, fortunately, at this time, two rival khans beyond the waves of the Caspian opposing each other with bloody cimeters.  The energetic young prince, by fortunate marriage, and by the success of his arms, rapidly extended his authority.  But again the awful plague swept Russia.  The annalists of those days thus describe the symptoms and the character of the malady: 

“One felt himself suddenly struck as by a knife plunged into the heart through the shoulder blades or between the two shoulders.  An intense fire seemed to burn the entrails; blood flowed freely from the throat; a violent perspiration ensued, followed by severe chills; tumors gathered upon the neck, the hip, under the arms or behind the shoulder blades.  The end was invariably the same—­death, inevitable, speedy, but terrible.”

Out of a hundred persons, frequently not more than ten would be left alive.  Moscow was almost depopulated.  In Smolensk but five individuals escaped, and they were compelled to abandon the city, the houses and the streets being encumbered with the putrefying bodies of the dead.[2] Just before this disaster, Moscow suffered severely from a conflagration.  The imperial palace and a large portion of the city were laid in ashes.  The prince then resolved to construct a Kremlin of stone, and he laid the foundations of a gorgeous palace in the year 1367.

[Footnote 2:  See Histoire de l’Empire de Russie, par M. Karamsin.  Traduite par MM.  St. Thomas et Jauffret.  Tome cinquieme, p. 10.]

Dmitri now began to bid defiance to the Tartars, doubly weakened by the sweep of the pestilence and by internal discord.  There were a few minor conflicts, in which the Russians were victorious, and, elated by success, they began to rally for a united effort to shake off the degrading Mogol yoke.  Three bands of the Tartars were encamped at the mouth of the Dnieper.  The Russians descended the river in barges, assailed them with the valor which their fathers had displayed, and drove the pagans, in wild rout, to the shores of the Sea of Azof.

The Tartars, astounded at such unprecedented audacity, forgetting, for the time, their personal animosities, collected a large army, and commenced a march upon Moscow.  The grand prince dispatched his couriers in every direction to assemble the princes of the empire with all the soldiers they could bring into the field.  Again the Tartars were repulsed.  For many years the Tartars had been in possession of Bulgaria, an extensive region east of the Volga.  In the year 1376, the grand prince, Dmitri, fitted out an expedition for the reconquest of that country.  The Russian arms were signally successful.  The Tartars, beaten on all hands, their cities burned, their boats destroyed, were compelled to submit to the conqueror.  A large sum of money was extorted from them to be distributed among the troops.  They were forced to acknowledge themselves, in their turn, tributary to Russia, and to accept Russian magistrates for the government of their cities.