It was the court of this great sovereign which, in 1275, was visited by the Venetian traveler Marco Polo.  This was the far-off Cathay, descriptions of which fired the imagination of Europe, and awoke a consuming desire to get access to its fabulous riches, and which two centuries later filled the mind of Columbus with dreams of reaching that land of wonders by way of the West.

The Polovtsui appealed to the nearest principalities for help, offering to adopt their religion and to become their subjects, in return for aid.  When several Princes came with their armies to the rescue, the Mongols sent messengers saying:  “We have no quarrel with you; we have come to destroy the accursed Polovtsui.”  The Princes replied by promptly putting the ambassadors all to death.  This sealed the fate of Russia.  There could be no compromise after that.  Upon that first battlefield, on the steppes near the sea of Azof, there were left six Princes, seventy chief boyars, and all but one-tenth of the Russian army.

After this thunderbolt had fallen an ominous quiet reigned for thirteen years.  Nothing more was heard of the Mongols—­but a comet blazing in the sky awoke vague fears.  Suddenly an army of five hundred thousand Asiatics returned, led by Batui, nephew of the Great Khan of Khans.

It was the defective political structure of Russia, its division into principalities, which made it an easy prey.  The Mongols, moving as one man, took one principality at a time, its nobles and citizens alone bearing arms, the peasants, by far the greater part, being utterly defenseless.  After wrecking and devastating that, they passed on to the next, which, however desperately defended, met the same fate.  The Grand Principality was a ruin; its fourteen towns were burned, and when, in the absence of its Grand Prince, Vladimir the capital city fell, the Princesses and all the families of the nobles took refuge in the cathedral and perished in the general conflagration (1238).  Two years later Kief also fell, with its white walls and towers embellished by Byzantine art, its cupolas of gold and silver.  All was laid in the dust, and only a few fragments in museums now remain to tell of its glory.  The annalist describes the bellowings of the buffaloes, the cries of the camels, the neighing of the horses, and howlings of the Tatars while the ancient and beautiful city was being laid low.

Before 1240 the work was complete.  There was a Mongol empire where had been a Russian.  Then the tide began to set toward Western Europe.  Isolated from the other European states by her religion, Russia had suffered alone.  No Europe sprang to her defense as to the defense of Spain from the Saracens.  Not until Poland and Hungary were threatened and invaded did the Western Kingdoms give any sign of interest.  Then the Pope, in alarm, appealed to the Christian states.  Frederick II. of Germany responded, and Louis IX. of France (Saint-Louis) prepared to lead a crusade.  But the storm had spent its fury upon the Slavonic people, and was content to pause upon those plains which to the Asiatic seemed not unlike his own home.