The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, February 1883 A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture. Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

GALITSCH AND THE GREAT REPUBLIC OF NOVGOROD.

We have briefly traced the history of the principality of Kief and that of its rival, Suzdal. Another powerful state, in the twelfth century was Galitsch, the modern Gallicia, the Red Russia of former days, a region south of Poland. This province, peopled by the Khorvats, or white Kroats, had ever remained Slavonic in nationality. Its princes were elected by popular assembly, and retained their dominion by its consent. The intercourse of Galitsch with her neighbors, Hungary and Poland, led to the formation of a powerful aristocracy, which succeeded, first, in controlling the popular assembly, and later in superseding it by an assembly composed exclusively of nobles. When Iaroslaf Osmomuisl, the same whose praise is sung in the song of Igor, put away his wife, Olga, for his paramour, Anastasia, the nobles compelled him to burn the latter alive, to banish her son, and to recognize Olga’s Vladimir as the rightful heir. The young prince, however, followed in the dissolute ways of his father, and went so far as to take for his second wife the widow of a priest, in defiant violation of a law of the Greek Church. The boyars summoned him to deliver the woman over to punishment. The prince, alarmed, fled to Hungary with his family and his treasure; and though in the vicissitude of events, he was recalled after a time, and bore rule for some years before his death, his dominions passed to Roman, prince of Volhynia, whom the Gallicians had invited to bear rule over them when Vladimir had fled from the realm.

This Roman was no easy-going, light-hearted prince of the usual Slavonic type, but a southern Andrei, a stern hero, visiting vengeance upon his enemies and striking terror into the barbarians. The Gallician boyars who had opposed him were put to death by slow torture. To some who had escaped from the country he promised pardon, but upon their return he confiscated their possessions and procured their condemnation to death. He was wont to say: “To eat your honey in peace you must first kill the bees.” He put to flight the Lithuanian tribes of the north, and harnessed his prisoners to the plow. This act of subjugation is commemorated in the folk song: “Thou art terrible, Roman; the Lithuanians are thy laboring oxen.” The report of his stern valor reached the ears of Pope Innocent III, who sent missionaries to bring him over to the Papal Church, and who promised by the sword of Saint Peter to make a great king of the Gallician-Volhynian prince. In the presence of the envoys, Roman drew his own sword from its scabbard and asked: “Is the sword of Saint Peter as strong as mine? While I wear it by my side I need no help from another.” He met his death in an imprudent, unequal combat, during a war with Poland, in 1215. The chronicle of Volhynia names him “the Great,” “the Autocrat of all the Russias;” and the chroniclers generally extol him as a second Monomakh, a hero who “walked in the ways of God, who fell like a lion upon infidels, who swooped like an eagle upon his prey, who was savage as a wild-cat, deadly as a crocodile.”

A more magnanimous hero was Roman’s son, Daniel, whose youth was roughly schooled in adversity. To his principality came Mstislaf the Bold, son of that Mstislaf the Brave, whom we have seen defying the tyranny of Andrei Bogoliubski. The younger Mstislaf was a knight errant, riding hither and thither in search of adventures. He wedded his daughter to the young Daniel, and virtually bore rule in Galitsch till his death in 1228. In wars with the Hungarians, the Poles, the Tartars, Daniel demeaned himself as the worthy son of a mighty sire, and toward the Gallician boyars, whose turbulence had endangered the state, he used a repressive, though not so severe a policy as that pursued by Roman. The Mongol invasion, that overthrew all the Russian governments, ruined Galitsch for the time, along with the others. Daniel did his best to support his shattered country, but was compelled, as a matter of personal safety to take refuge in Hungary. When permitted to return to the desolated principality, he invited thither a vast number of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, upon whom he conferred abundant privileges as an inducement for them to remain in a depopulated country. The last named people, alien, tenacious, obnoxious to all Christian civilizations, an isolated race wherever their restless fate and their love of gain lead them to emigrate, have proved a disturbing element in Russian nationality. Incapable of assimilation, or unwilling thereto, their population of three millions have no interests, no sympathies with the rest of the nation, save in the intercourse connected with barter, or the stewardship of estates. A continual source of irritation and antagonism, they are “the Polish scourge” of the empire. The hospitality extended to them by Daniel Roman is regarded as the one mistake of his otherwise sagacious administration.

Unable to cope with the all-devouring Mongols, although he made repeated efforts to check their advances, Daniel took part in various European wars, always with brilliant success. The Hungarians spread the fame of the order of his troops, their oriental weapons, the magnificence of their prince, whose Greek habit was broidered with gold, whose caparisons glistened with richly-chased metals, and with jewels, whose saber and arrows were of marvellous workmanship. His warriors were equipped with short stirrups, high saddles, long caftans, or robes, turbans surmounted by aigrets, sabers and poniards in the belt, bows slung at the shoulder, and arrows in the quiver. Their coursers were fleet as the east wind.

Daniel was among the last of the Russian princes to render submission to the Khan of the Horde. “You have done well to come at last,” said Batui, when the prince presented himself at the Tatar court. The khan waived the humiliations usually put upon the princes at their reception; and seeing that the mare’s milk offered his vassal was distasteful, gave him instead a cup of wine. The Gallician-Volhynian, however, was ever feverish under the hard yoke of the Mongols. The civil conflicts of his youth, the ruin of Russia by the Mongols, and the European wars that filled his later years, left him no repose. In a more propitious era his rare powers could have rendered enduring service to his states. As it was, he could not so much as save his own Galitsch from the arrogance of a foreign conqueror. Upon his death it passed to other princes of his family, vassals of the khan, and two centuries later it was lost to Russia, by absorption into the kingdom of Poland. Its fate is unique; for with this exception, no integral state of the early Russian realm has ever become the permanent possession of aliens.

Unique, also, is the history of the wide and glorious principality of Novgorod, the political center of the Russia of the Northwest, the Slavic home of liberty. Its name shines upon the brief but resplendent roll of free nations with Sparta, Arragon, Switzerland. Nay, in the magnitude of its extent, in the exaltation of its freedom, it is not shamed in comparison with our own republic. The sentiment of liberty is traceable from the beginnings of history. During long periods in the earlier epochs, it lay concealed, a spark covered in ashes; but has ever re-kindled in an auspicious time, lighting horizon and zenith with its effulgence. Under the subjections, the servitudes of the ancient empires, the Hebrew theocracy conserved this inextinguishable aspiration of the race. If certain of the Hebrew kings oppressed their subjects, they found them ready for protest and for revolt. When the Roman empire laid its yoke upon the world, the Hebrews of Palestine chose national extinction to national thraldom, and perished by the talons of the Roman eagles. Even then stood ready the new races of the North to catch the falling torch, and to bear it aloft in their sinewy hands. In the mediæval darkness, it glowed, a beacon-light from the summits of Arragon in Spain, and from the peaks of Switzerland. But before Switzerland had a name, when Arragon was scarcely more than a name, Novgorod, by the frozen lakes, far in the wilds of an unknown country, unexplored, untrodden by any civilized people—Novgorod, hidden in its northern nights, was cherishing a freedom such as the republic of the Netherlands cherished in the sixteenth, and the republic of America cherishes in the nineteenth century. To the Slavs of Ilmen belongs the proud distinction of guarding intact through more than six hundred years the instinct for freedom inalienable to the Slavic race. The unrest, the ferment of the Russias to-day, may be traced back to the glorious history, the pathetic surrender of Novgorod the Great; and those who seek to read hopefully the signs of the times, look for the day not far distant, when the venerable “My Lord, Novgorod,” shall receive again his banished bell with weeping and with acclamations; when again his citizens shall assemble in the court of Iaroslaf, and shall proclaim liberty to all his children gathered within his vast and ancient borders.

As we have written, the Novgorodians, Slavs of Ilmen, were the people who founded Russian unity, by the call of Rurik. When he came to them, their city contained a hundred thousand inhabitants, and was the capital of a realm that had a population of three hundred thousand. At least three centuries must have been required for the making of such a state; nor is it improbable that some of the aboriginal Finns known to Herodotus (B. C. 500) mingled with the Slav emigrants who passed the confines of Asia in the fourth Christian century. Ethnologists are of opinion that the early Novgorodians, like the other Russians of all time, are a composite race. The earliest chronicles of the city describe it as divided by the Volkhof, and situated on a vast plain in the midst of dense forests. The river runs northward, from Lake Ilmen to Lake Ladoga. On its right bank rose the cathedral of Saint Sophia, built by Iaroslaf the Great; the Novgorodian kreml, or acropolis, enclosing the palaces of archbishop and prince, the quarter of the potters, and the zagorodni, or suburbs. Here, in 1862, amid national solemnities and festivities, was dedicated the monument to Russian unity, that ennobles a thousand years of Russian history. The left bank contains the court of Iaroslaf, the quarter of commerce, as also those of the carpenters, and the Slavs, par eminence. In the earlier centuries it possessed also a Prussian, or Lithuanian quarter; and hither resorted merchants from all parts of the Orient. In the fourteenth century, the city was enclosed by ramparts, formed of gabions, strengthened at frequent intervals by stone towers. Portions of these defences still remain, attesting this immense extent originally. The cathedral, scarred by the wars of eight centuries, still preserves within the vivid hues of its frescoes, its pillars adorned with figures of saints painted upon golden backgrounds. From the interior of the dome, bends the divine form of Our Lord; beneath him hangs the banner of the Virgin, borne upon the ramparts in times of extremity, for the strengthening of the souls of the besieged, or to strike dismay into the souls of the besiegers. From the cupola, the light falls dimly upon the tombs of the mighty Iaroslaf, the holy Archbishop Nikita, whose prayers once extinguished a conflagration, of Mstislaf the Brave, the hero who defied Andrei Bogoliubski, and of many another captain and saint.