The intellectual culture of the time had not yet, one must admit, penetrated the masses of the Slavonic tribes. Yet the Normans, as the propagators of culture, speedily and easily merged into one with the conquered tribes, much easier perhaps than the Normans who came with William the Conqueror amalgamated with Britons and Saxons in England. Had the Tatar invasion not taken place, it is highly probable that the intellectual development of Russia would have followed the same lines as that of western Europe. The commercial and intellectual relations with the rest of Europe, so eagerly sought after and cultivated by the Norman princes, would have continued and brought the Slav countries in increasingly closer contact with the west and under the influence of all the currents that were destined to traverse Europe later on. The Renaissance and the revival of learning which shed their light upon the dark mediæval age (and only a few rays of which found their way to Russia by way of Poland at a much later period) would have made themselves felt in Russia. This was, however, not to happen. The Mongolian invasion had actually cut off Russia from Europe, and brought it under the Tatar influence. The Norman civilisation, which was in a nascent state, was crushed; the threads connecting Russia with Europe were cut off. The wave of Mongolian invasion had inundated the flat land situated between Europe and Asia, carried away and destroyed every vestige of western influence. Kiev, Moscow, Tver, Riazan, Tchernigov, and Smolensk were conquered by the hordes of the Great Khan, who from his seat somewhere in the heart of China or in the centre of Asia sent down his generals and tax collectors. Hundreds of thousands of Mongols came to Russia, mixed with the Slavs, and influenced habits, customs, civilisation, social life, administration and even language. The influence was a very far-reaching and deep one; Mongolism has penetrated Russian life to a much higher degree than a Russian would care to admit or western Europeans have realised. Greater and greater became the gulf between the Russian and the Romance and Teutonic worlds. But that gulf might have been bridged over and Russia might have been saved, when the dawn of better and happier days broke in, by another power: the influence of the church. Here again, however, owing to circumstances, this in many respects civilising agent was powerless.