Some of the most memorable figures depicted in the frescoes are the prophets and warrior krng amp;of the Old Testament. The very severity of their stylized, Byzantine presentation makes the compassionate figure of Mary
‹ccm a unique and welcome source of relief and deliverance. She was the protectress of Kiev and Novgorod as she had been of Constantinople. Russians were singing hymns to her presanctified state and dedicating • lunches to her assumption into heaven well before Western Christendom. She alone brought respite from damnation in the famous apocryphal tale of "Trie Virgin's Visit to Hell," which was brought from Byzantium in the twelfth century to new and enduring popularity in Russia.31 For the love of departed sinners, she had descended into the Inferno to win them annual i ? lease from their suffering during the period from Holy Thursday to
I'rntecost.
Much of the mythology that had gathered about the holy cities of curlier civilizations was transferred to Kiev and Novgorod; and the lore of ancient shrines and monasteries, to the new ones of the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. The legend that the apostle Andrew had brought Christianity directly to Kiev just as Peter had to Rortie was taken over from Constantinople. I egends resembling those about the catacombs at Rome were developed w amiujdjthe caves of Kiev, and the idea subtly grew that Kiev might be a "second Jerusalem."32
TEe unity of Kievan Russia was above all that of a common religious fuilh. The forms of faith and worship were almost the only uniformities in this loosely structured civilization. Such economic strength and political cohesion as had existed began to break down with the internecine strife of the late twelfth century, the Latin occupation of Contantinople in 1204, and ihc subsequent assaults almost simultaneously launched against the Eastern Shivs by the Mongols from the east and the Teutonic Knights from the.west. The Mongols, who sacked Kiev in 1240, proved the more formidable Inc. They prowled at will across the exposed steppe, interdicted the lucrative river routes to the south, and left the "mother of Russian cities" in a state of continuing insecurity. Cultural independence and local self-government were maintained only by regular payment of tribute to the Mongol khan, Unlike the Islamic Arabs, who had brought Greek science and philosophy with (hem when they extended their power into the Christian world, the nomadic pagans of Genghis and Batu Khan brought almost nothing of intellectual or artistic worth. The clearest cultural legacy of the Mongols lay in the military and administrative sphere. Mongol terms for money and weapons filtered into the Russian language; and new habits of petitioning rulers through a form of prostration attd kowtow known as chelobitnaia (literally, "beating the forehead") were also taken over.83
The period of Mongol domination-roughly from 1240 until the termination of tribute m 1480-was not so mucn one of "Oriental des-
»i Viii -1I-.
potism^34 as of decentralized localism among the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. This "appanage period" of Russian history was one of those when, in Spengler's words,
. . . high history lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, clinging to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timefess village," the "eternal" peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in mother earth-a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. . . . Men live from hand to mouth with petty thrifts and petty fortunes and endure. . . . Masses are trampled on, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on.35
The "high history" of the period was that of warrior princes from the east whose enervating straggles further fit Spengler's characterization of "a drama noble in its aimlessness . . . like the course of the stars … the alternance of land and sea."36
Like the Kievan princes before them, the Mongol conquerors adopted a religion (Islam), established a capital on the lower reaches of a great river (Sarai on the Volga), were initially weakened more by a new conqueror from the east (Tamerlane) than by virtually simultaneous assaults from the west (the Muscovite victory at Kulikovo in 1380), and were plagued by inner fragmentation» The khanate of Kypchak, or "Golden Horde," was but one of several dependent states within the far-flung empire of Genghis Khan; it was a racially conglomerate and ideologically permissive realm which gradually disintegrated in the course of the fifteenth century, becoming less important politically than its own "appanages": the separate Tatar khanates in the Crimea, on the upper Volga aTKazan, and at Astrakhan, the Caspian mouth of the Volga. Cunning diplomacy and daring raids enabled the Crimean Tatars and other lesser Tatar groups to maintain militarily menacing positions in the southern parts of European Russia until late in the
.- » ¦ , ¦""'¦"¦ t..«-»^a^» «»«a«iu' »«¦ ' "**
eighteenth century.
The real importance of the Tatars' protracted presence in the Eastern European steppelands lies not so much in their direct influence on Russian culture as in their indirect role in providing the Orthodox Eastern Slavs with a common enemy against whom they could unite and rediscover a sense of common purpose. Slowly but irresistibly, the Eastern Slavs emerged from the humiliation and fragmentation of the Mongol period to expand their power eastward-beyond the former realm of the Golden Horde, beyond that of the so-called"Bliie*H6'f3e^Ton meliTeppes of Central Asia, on to the Pacific? To understand how Russia emerged from its "dark ages" to such triumphant accomplishment, one must not look primarily either to Byzantium or to the Mongols: the Golden Horn or the Golden Horde. One must
Itn.k Hither to the "primitive fertility" which began to, bring, an agricultural. •tu plus and a measure of prosperity; and, even more important, to "the ,. 1 unuilaiion of spiritual energies during long silence"37 in the monasteries kimI ItVth'c accumulation of political power by the new city which rosejo.
dominate this region: Moscow.
2. The Forest
Ihe most important immediate consequence for Russia of the Mongol sweep across the Eurasian steppe in the thirteenth century was that the once-outlying forest regions of the north now became the main center of an j independent Orthodox culture. What the change of geographical focus from the central Dnieper to the upper Volga really meant can never be precisely ascertained. Pitifully few documentary or archeological materials have survived the fights, frosts, and fires of the north. Cultural historians are inclined to stress continuities with the Kievan age, pointing out that the principal cities of the northeast--Vladimir, Suzdal, Riazan, Rostov, and Yaroslavl- were almost as old as Kiev; that Vladimir had been the ruling seat of the leading Kievan princes for many years prior to the sack of Kiev; and that Novgorod, the second city of Kievan times, remained free of Mongol invasions and provided continuity with its steadily increasing prosperity. The characters, events, and artistic forms of Kievan times dominated the chronicles and epics "which assumed their final shape in the creative memory of the Russian north."1 The ritualized forms of art and worshipjmd the peculiar sensitivity to beauty and history-all remained constant features of Russian culture" ~