Europe. They were no deliberate wreckers, either, except in cases of military exigency; nor oppressors, beyond the taxation they imposed; and their very numbers precluded them from submerging others. The legend of the overwhelming flood is a melodramatic invention: Soubatoï won his victories, in every case, with very small, but exceedingly well-equipped, mobile, and splendidly commanded bodies of troops.
The truth appears to be that he found nought but ruins everywhere—a rotting Empire, a country parted from Europe already, and cast, both from the political and intellectual point of view, into an almost utter isolation. Since Jaroslav (1016–1054) had married one of his sisters to Casimir of Poland, another to the King of Norway, and a third to Henry I. of France, no similar alliance had carried the tradition down to the heirs who fought over the great Kiovian Prince's legacy; and even as early as 1169, Kiev had been sacked by barbarians who did not come out of Asia. All the small Russian Princes strove for the possession of the old capital, carrying fire and sword with them. And the truth is this—that, by reason of her spiritual alliance with Byzantium, Russia, thus devastated and dismembered by her own children, was bound to a corpse, held in vassalage by the learning of the Greeks at a moment when doom had fallen on the antique culture, when the ancient schools were closed, when the introduction of the Oriental view had stifled that free inquiry essential to all progress. The contemporaries of Photius ascribed (A.D. 891) the patriarch’s knowledge to the spells of a Jewish page-boy, and the learning of Archbishop Theodore (Santabaren) was confused by Leo the Grammarian with evocations of the spirits of the dead. Historiography was reduced to the collecting of legends, the teaching of philosophy was forbidden, intellectual activity was circumscribed within the sphere of religious polemics—marked phases, all these, of an irreparable decay. Even in the twelfth century the eastern monasteries proved themselves incapable of utilizing the scientific materials at their disposal.
The intellectual isolation of orthodox Russia was the direct outcome of her affiliation to her Byzantine alma-mater. Out of the 240 writers who appeared in Russia up till the close of the seventeenth century (without teckoning the Catholics of the south-west), 190 were monks, 20 belonged to the secular clergy, and the remaining 30 dealt chiefly with religious subjects. Thus literature and science were almost exclusively Church property. And this Church, even in the thirteenth century, was a closed body, shut up in itself. Orthodoxy forbade all contact with
