It is not unlikely that many of these tales were brought back from Palestine, the common camping-ground of the Christian nations during the crusades. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land began soon after the introduction of Christianity into Russia, and in the twelfth century we have the first account of such a journey, from the pen of the abbot Daniel. None of the later accounts of Palestine and Constantinople compare in interest with the simple narrative of Daniel the Palmer, after whose _Pilgrimage_ they are fashioned and whose very words they often incorporated in their _Travels_. The purpose of all these was to serve as incitements to religious contemplation. There is but one account of a journey to the west of Europe. It was undertaken by the metropolitan Isidor who, in 1437, attended the Council of Florence. A few years later Afanási Nikítin described his journey to India, which was one of the earliest undertaken by Westerners in the same century; but while Vasco de Gama and Columbus were revolutionising the knowledge of geography, and were making the discovery of a route to India the object of mercantile development, Nikítin’s report, important though it was, had absolutely no effect upon dormant Russia. As there existed no external geography, so there was no external history. But fortunately for Russia, a long series of chronicles have saved historical events from oblivion. The earliest chronicle, that of Néstor, was the model for all that followed. Excepting the history of Kúrbski, who had come into contact with Western science through the Polish, and Krizhánich, who was not a Russian, there was no progress made in the chronological arrangement of historical facts from Néstor to Tatíshchev, while in style and dramatic diction there is a decided retrogression. The promise held out by the historian of the twelfth century was not made good for six hundred years. Néstor and Sylvester, the continuator, were of the clerical profession, and naturally the religious element, richly decked out with legend, folktale and reports of eye-witnesses, is the prevailing tone throughout the whole production. The Bible and the Byzantines, Hamartolos and John Malalas, serve as models for the fluent style of this production, but the vivid, dramatic narrative bears witness to considerable talent in the author. At first only the cities of Kíev, Nóvgorod and Súzdal, and Volhynia seem to have possessed such chronicles; but those that are preserved show traces of being composed of shorter accounts of other individual places. In the following centuries, most of the larger cities and monasteries kept chronological records of important events, and with the centralisation of Russia about Moscow there also appeared a species of Court chroniclers whose dry narration is often coloured in favour of the tsarate.