Thus the Mongolian invasion had cut off Russia from Europe and whilst the latter was passing through the phases of transition, approaching slowly but gradually the times of light and learning, Russia stood still. The Europe of the Renaissance was not a _creatio ex nihilo_. It was the result of a slow process of development. The barbarians who had built their realms on the ruins of the ancient worlds, Hellas and Rome, had taken over the classical heritage left to them after the disappearance of the Roman Empire. Rude and barbarous, however, these new conquerors had no understanding for the value of the heritage and destroyed many of its richest treasures. Worlds of intellectual culture were lost. But slowly the age of understanding dawned and the former barbarians brought forth many of the treasures which they had relegated to the lumber-room, added many of their own, and blended them into one whole. The result was the Græco-Roman, Romance, and Teutonic civilisation. Crusades, Arabian civilisation passing by way of Spain, scholasticism, Reformation, Renaissance, revival of learning, the discovery of new worlds, the spread of commerce, scientific inventions and discoveries, stimulating the desire for learning and creating impulses in every new direction--all these new and stirring events were so many phases through which European society and European life passed before they reached the state of modern development. Many were the streams and cross-currents that traversed Europe separately before they united and continued the more rapid advance of a new life and civilisation. All this was lacking in Russia. Russia missed during its Mongolian period, the time of general transition. None of the forces which, although invisibly, were steadily furrowing the European soil and preparing it for the influx of fresh air and new light, were at work in Russia. The phase of transition had not yet commenced. That period of constant change, of mingled decadence and spiritual growth, that ceaseless blending of the old and the new, unnoticed at the time but clearly distinguished from the distance of later ages, was lacking in Russia. There was no pope, no powerful church, and consequently no Reformation and no spirit of individualism--no feudalism, no knights, no Crusades and no acquaintance with foreign lands, no spread of commerce, and no widening of the mental horizon of the people. There were no learned monks copying Greek and Latin manuscripts, paving the way for scholasticism and modern thought. There was even no language in which the treasures of the ancient world could be communicated to the Slavs. Few people could write, few even count properly.