The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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had lapsed during the long civil strife. In the year 1030 Livland was again brought under some sort of subjection, and the town of Youriev (the German Dorpat) founded near Lake Peipus. The domestic troubles of Poland, where Mieceslav II., son of Boleslas Khrabrie (who had died 1025), was waging a hotly contested war with his brothers and the Kaiser Konrad II., gave an opportunity for regaining the Red Russian towns which perennially changed hands according to the respective strength and weakness of the two countries. 1031Yaroslav, in conjunction with his half-brother, invaded Poland and wrested back the lost territory. In 1034 died Mstislav, at the end of a day’s hunting, having shortly before lost his only son Evstaf. Of all the sons of Vladimir this intrepid warrior “with dark face and large eyes” seems most to have enchained the imagination of the national chronicler.
Yaroslav, freed from the disquieting possibility of trouble which Mstislav must always have presented, made himself still more secure by seizing and imprisoning, on pretext of disaffection, Soudislav of Pskov, another member of the princely house. Shortly afterwards he was called upon to defend Kiev from an attack of the Petchenigs. Near the walls of the city Yaroslav joined issue with the barbarians, his vanguard consisting of Varangians, flanked right and left by the men of Kiev and Novgorod. After a battle which lasted till evening the Petchenigs broke and fled, leaving enormous numbers of dead on the field, and losing many more in crossing the rivers which impeded their flight. On the ground of this victory Yaroslav founded the Cathedral of S. Sofia, extending at the same time the boundaries of Kiev so as to include this building, and enclosing the city with a stone wall. Well might the Kievians rejoice as they watched the new works, which were alike the witness of their growing prosperity and a memorial of a past danger; they had at last grasped their nettle, and the might of the Petchenigs, which had hung so long like a menacing shadow ready at any moment to ride out of the steppe a grim reality, was for ever shattered. And as the new cathedral rose before them their hopes might soar to a point which would raise the mother of Russian cities to the level of Constantinople.
Amid their own congratulations and complacency came news of the misfortunes of a neighbouring and rival state; possibly across the border, through Krobatian and Drevlian lands, more probably by a less direct route, by word of merchants from the Oder and Weichsel filtering down from Novgorod or Polotzk, tidings would reach them of wild doings in Poland. Mieceslav II. had “passed in battle and in storm”; and diminished though his territories were under stress of German, Russian, and Bohemian filchings, they were more than a handful for his widow and youthful son to manage. Richense, daughter of Ehrenfrid, Pfalzgraf of the Rhine, tries to play the Queen-mother with the support of a hierarchy itself not yet firmly established; but she is no Olga, moreover she is a German. The bishops are German too, and throne, hierarchy, new religion, and all are involved in the whirlwind of a reaction that scatters them in all directions, Richense to the court of the Emperor in Saxony, her son, Kazimir, to France, where he enters the service of Mother Church as a monk of the celebrated Abbey of Cluny. Yaroslav, taking advantage of the weakness of his western neighbour, began in 1040 a series of campaigns against the tribes which inhabited the dense marsh and river-sected forests lying to the north-east of Poland, between Russia and the Baltic. The Yatvyags first occupied his attention, though it is doubtful if he acquired more than a transient sway over them. He next turned the weight of his arms against the Lit’uanians, upon a section of whom at least he imposed a tribute. The year 1041 found him actually in Polish territory, in the province or palatinate of Mazovia, which had separated from the lands of the Polish crown—if such a designation can be used during an interregnum—under the rule of a heathen noble named Mazlav, from whom the province took its name. Meanwhile the force of the reaction in Poland had spent itself, the bishops retook possession of their dioceses, and Kazimir was fetched, with the Pope’s permission, from the peaceful seclusion of the Burgundian monastery to the management of a country smouldering with the embers of anarchy and religious persecution. Yaroslav seized the opportunity to form an alliance with the young Duke of Poland, by virtue of which the contested Galician or Red Russian March was definitely ceded to the Grand Prince, who on his part helped Kazimir to defeat the rebel Voevoda20 of Mazovia and reannex that province to his duchy. The good understanding between the princes was cemented by the marriage of Kazimir with Mariya, sister of Yaroslav.
Russia was thus freed from the apprehension of trouble both on the Polish frontier and on the side of the steppes, where the power of the Petchenigs was effectively broken. A new war-cloud, however, rose in the south, emanating from a quarrel among Greek and Russian merchants at Constantinople, in which one of the latter was killed. 1043Yaroslav demanded satisfaction from the Greek Emperor, Constantine Monomachus, and not obtaining it, he sent an army against the Greeks, confiding its direction to his eldest son Vladimir and a boyarin named Vyatcha. Scorning the overtures for peace which came at late moment from the frightened Emperor, the Russians met their enemies in a naval fight, wherein the Greek fire and the inevitable storm played their accustomed parts. Six thousand of Vladimir’s men were forced to abandon their damaged vessels and attempt to make good their retreat overland, led by Vyatcha, who would not desert them in their extremity. Constantine, instead of resting content with the victory which fortune had given him, or following it up with a vigorous pursuit, satisfied himself with half-measures, returning in premature triumph to his capital while he sent the remainder of his ships to hunt the Russians out of the Bosphorus. Vladimir meanwhile had rallied his fleet and turned fiercely at bay, destroying twenty-five of the Byzantine vessels and killing their admiral. Consoled by this success he returned home, carrying with him many prisoners. The division which had attempted the land passage was less happy; overpowered by a large Greek force near Varna, the survivors were taken captive to Constantinople, where many of them, including the brave boyarin, were deprived of their eyesight.
This was the last of the series of expeditions made by the early rulers of Russia against Constantinople, expeditions which suggest a parallel with those against Rome which exercised such a fatal fascination over the Saxon and Franconian Emperors of Germany at the same period. Not for many a long century were the Russian arms to push again across the blue waters of the Danube into the land of their desire. In 1046 peace was formally concluded between the two countries, and the blinded prisoners were allowed to return to their native land.
The remaining years of Yaroslav were years of peace and prosperity within his realm. Allied with the Court of Poland by the double marriage of his sister with Duke Kazimir, and of the latter’s sister with his second son Isiaslav, he was in like manner connected with the house of Arpad by the marriage of his youngest daughter Anastasia with Andrew I. of Hungary; with Harold the Brave, afterwards King of Norway, who espoused his eldest daughter Elizabeth; and with the royal family of France by the marriage of his second daughter Anne with Henri I. And not only by court alliances was the Russia of this period connected with the other states of Europe. Commerce had made great strides in the last half-hundred years, and Kiev, in the zenith of her fortunes, attracted traders from many lands; besides her 300 churches she had 8 markets, there were separate quarters for Hungarian, Hollandish, German, and Skandinavian merchants, and the Dniepr was constantly covered with cargo vessels. Novgorod was another important centre of trade and foreign intercourse. A more convenient medium of exchange, always a stimulating factor in commerce, was gradually superseding the hides and pelts which were the earliest articles of sale and barter; the first step had been to substitute leather tokens cut from the skins themselves, called kounas, from kounitza, a marten (being generally cut from a marten pelt). These were replaced, as silver grew more plentiful in the country, by coins of that metal, stamped with rude representations of the reigning prince.
Following the time-hallowed custom of his forbears, Yaroslav in his last days divided the lands of his realm among his surviving sons. (Vladimir, the eldest, had died in 1052.) Isiaslav became, after his father’s death, Grand Prince of Kiev, his four brothers being settled respectively in the sub-provinces of Tchernigov, Péréyaslavl, Smolensk, and Volhynia. Polotzk was still held by the other branch of the family. Yaroslav died at Voutchigorod on the 19th February 1054. On a winter’s day his corpse was borne in mournful procession along the snow-clad road to Kiev, there to rest in a marble tomb in a side chapel of the Cathedral of S. Sofia.
Under Yaroslav Russia enjoyed a prosperity and position that was lost in the partitions and discords of his successors,