There were no schools and the attempts to establish some such institutions during the seventeenth century failed. A school was founded at Moscow under Alexis, but here only a foreign language or two were taught. Its aim was to train translators for the government. There was no art, nor technical science. There were no medical men. The two or three foreign practitioners were considered as sorcerers. Towards the end of the seventeenth century therefore Russia had absolutely no culture of her own. All that the Normans had established had been wiped out. The Byzantine influence had no effect. And when after a struggle extending over three centuries the czardom of Moscow had thrown off the shackles of the Great Khan, liberated itself from thraldom and laid the foundations of the great empire of Russia, it had only established, on the ruins of the old Mongolian, a new state which was Mongolian and Tatar in its essence and spirit, in its customs and institutions, and had little or nothing in common with the rest of Europe. Moscow was the inheritor of Mongolism, the Czar was spiritually, and even physically, a descendant of Mongol princes. Ivan IV married a Mongolian princess, his son married a sister of the Mongol Godunov. They had actually taken over the inheritance of the khans of Kiptchak. It was in this barren soil that Peter sowed the seed of European culture. What happened? Peter was undoubtedly great and deserves this title. He was one of the great makers of history. But though great in his plans, great in what he wished to accomplish, he was not great in what he really attained. He only saw the superficiality of European civilisation. He introduced it like some foreign product, like some fashionable article, like some exotic plant, without first asking whether the national soil was propitious for its cultivation. He, at the utmost, created a hot-house atmosphere where his plants could vegetate, and they remained what they originally were: exotic. He failed to see that civilisation is the product of a long process of evolution, the natural product of the social and national conditions, drawing its life and sap from the inner forces of the people. Instead of making use of these inner forces of his people, he endeavoured to introduce civilisation by his power of will. He only had an eye for the effects but not for the causes that were working as the hidden springs.