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 of chaos and disorder.  But to them it was only the vicissitudes naturally occurring in the life of a great nation.  They were proud of their nationality, which had existed nearly as long as from Columbus to our own day.  They gloried in their splendid background of great deeds and their long line of heroes reaching back to Rurik.  Their Princes were proud and powerful—­their followers (the Drujiniki)—­noble and fearless—­who could stand before them?  They would have exchanged their glories for those of no nation upon the earth, except perhaps that waning empire of the Caesars at Constantinople!

Such was the sentiment of Russian nationality at the time when its overwhelming humiliation suddenly came, a degrading subjection to Asiatic Mongols, which lasted 250 years.

In the year 1224 there appeared in the Southeast a strange host who claimed the land of the Polovtsui, a Tatar clan which had been for centuries encamped about the Sea of Azof.  The Russian chronicler naively says:  “There came upon us for our sins unknown nations.  God alone knew who they were, or where they came from—­God, and perhaps wise men, learned in books”—­which it is evident the chronicler was not!  The invaders were Mongols—­that branch of the human family from which had come the Tatars and the Huns, already familiar to Russia.  But these Mongols were the vanguard of a vast army which had streamed like a torrent through the heart of Asia, conquering as it came; gathering one after another the Asiatic kingdoms into an empire ruled by Genghis Khan, a sovereign who in forty years had made himself master of China and the greater part of Asia—­saying:  “As there is only one Sun in Heaven, so there should be only one Emperor on the Earth”; and when he died, in 1227, he left the largest empire that had ever existed, and one which he was preparing to extend into Western Europe.