The Baltic Letts, occupying Esthonia, had been subjugated by the Dane, Knut the Great, the conqueror of England. But Livonia had submitted to the arms of Iaroslaf the Great, who founded there Iurief, later called Dorpat; and Mstislaf, son of Vladimir Monomakh, had taken one of the chief cities of the Tchudi. The princes of Polotsk and the republic of Novgorod claimed the country and virtually bore rule over it. To Livonia early in the twelfth century came the German merchant in search of trade, and the Latin priest, seeking souls for his hire and subjects for his Pope. The monk Meinhard, commissioned by the Archbishop of Bremen, compulsorily brought the Livonians under his sway, and was constituted bishop of their country. But this invasion of a stranger race bearing the wares of commerce, and the authority of Rome behind the symbol of the cross, implied the overthrow of the untutored but brave descendants of the Tchud hero Kalevy, the extinction of their liberties and their independence. In 1187 Meinhard completed a church at Uexhüll, and surrounded it with a fortification. Eleven years later the tribes revolted against their episcopal master, and killed him in open warfare. They then plunged into the Dwina to wash off and send back to Germany their baptism, and restored to their shrines their ancient gods. Innocent III preached a crusade against them, and another bishop, commander of a large fleet, built for his capital the town of Riga (1200). In the following year was established the Order of the Brothers of the Army of Christ, or the Sword Bearers, later known as the Livonian Knights, “men of iron,” who broke the strength of the tribes, and against whom the Russian princes, occupied with their own dissensions, made no united resistance. The knights intrenched themselves firmly in the regions whither they hewed with the sword a pathway for the cross, and built fortifications of cemented stone, that were a wonder and a terror to the simple natives, who were driven in herds to the waters of baptism, or massacred if they offered resistance. A song of the Tchudi of Pskof, entitled “The Days of Slavery,” commemorates this period of misery: “Destroying fiends were unchained against us. The priests strangled us with their rosaries, the greedy knights plundered us, murderers with their weapons cut us in pieces. The father of the cross stole our wealth; he stole the treasure from the hiding place. He hewed down the sacred tree, he polluted the fountain, the waters of salvation. The axe smote the oak of Tara, the cruel hatchet the tree of Kero.”