By the charter of Iaroslaf the Novgorodians were accorded the right of choosing their sovereign; hence, when circumstances rendered a Lithuanian prince desirable for their protection against a Muscovite one, they obtained him by election. But affinities of race, religion, and a common history, were too strong to permit a permanent union with a foreign power. From the Horde, Vasili, by bountiful payments, procured an _iarluik_ for seven appanages, including Murom, Suzdal, and Nijni or Lower Novgorod—all belonging to his less wealthy kinsmen, who were offered their choice of becoming his dependents, or of dying in captivity or exile. The succession of the eldest son had procured the elevation of the nobles of the grand prince to a subordinate princely rank and power. In view of this fact, perhaps, the citizens of Nijni-Novgorod voluntarily surrendered their last titular prince, Boris: for if a Muscovite boyar could become a prince, and if the Muscovite grand prince could work his will with the khan, why resist this ever growing, ever more dominant power? Accordingly, amid the clangor of the bells of these ancient, hitherto independent cities, the son of the Donskoï was proclaimed their sovereign. Arrogant and overbearing to his kinsmen, the native princes, the sagacious Vasili maintained amicable relations with the Tatar on the east, and the Lithuanian on the west, notwithstanding that he had been hostage and prisoner at Saraï´, that he had escaped thence as a fugitive, and that his domains were twice invaded by the hordes of its peoples. Tamerlane, at this time at variance with his former general, Toktamuish, harried the dismembered empire of Kipchak and moved westward into Russian boundaries, destroying the people by the sword, and their possessions by the fire-brand. Moscow was again in peril: in its streets and its homes were revived with fearfulness and trembling tales of the destruction of 1382. The Tatars were sixty leagues away at Elets on the Don, a town which they razed. Its ancient monastery of the Trinity has four memorial chapels commemorative of the citizens that perished at the time—all the place contained, save a few fugitives. There the wild horsemen suddenly turned southward and rode into Azof, the emporium of the wealth of merchants who had come thither from Cairo, Venice, Genoa, Catalania, and the Biscayan country. Fresh from the hoarded treasures of Bokhara and Hindustan, and having in expectancy the wealth of Constantinople and of the Nile cities, they were allured to the regions of the south in preference to the toilsome way over steppe and through forest, to the peopled country of the north.