man even suffered imprisonment for his fidelity in the matter.
Subsequently, in the course of the never-ending discords of these times, Kiev was taken by storm and visited with all the horrors of a sacked city. The orthodox Church regarded this as Heaven's just punishment for the heresy of her metropolitan. So ruinous was the disaster that the post of metropolitan remained vacant for about ten years, after which the city had sufficiently revived for a restoration of its ecclesiastical functions, and the patriarch of Constantinople then appointed a Greek, Nicephorus ii. (a.d. 1185). But the storm-cloud which had rolled back for an interval soon gathered again, and Kiev was captured and sacked a second time, a fate from which she never recovered. Her ruin followed sixteen years later in the Mongol invasion. This ends the first period in russian Church history. Hitherto Kiev had been the metropolis both of the State and of the Church, though sharing some of the honour with the older capital in the north, Novgorod. After her own civil wars and the cataclysm of the Asiatic invasion this was no longer the case.
The internal disorders of the twelfth century were followed in the thirteenth century by the infinitely greater disaster of the Mongol invasion. This was part of a vast movement that was sweeping up from Central Asia and threatening to engulf Europe in a sea of barbarism. The Mongols were of the same race as those devastating invaders known as the Huns, who had brought terror to Rome at an earlier period. But in course of time they became Mohammedans, the religion of the Prophet having passed on through Persia to the wild tribes of the region since known as Turkestan. Therefore we might regard their progress as that of the right wing of the vast army of Islam which was advancing in half-moon formation, and closing in upon the civilised world all round its limits from Russia to Spain. But this Mongol invasion had really no relations with the movements of the Moors in Africa and the West; it was the greatest of a series of
