After the destruction of Vladimir, Rostoff and Suzdal, the whole principality of Vladimir was ravaged. The lands now included in the governments of Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Tver and Moscow, with a part of Novgorod and Vologda, were scenes of ruin and terror. Everywhere the same marks of Mongols. Such noted places as Tver, Torjok, Volokolamsk, Yaroslavl and Mologa were sacked and burned to the ground, as well as villages and settlements beyond reckoning. The Russians looked on this invasion as a testimony of God’s anger, such an evil as a flood or an earthquake, irresistible and almighty. In small villages, when the Mongols appeared, the people grew helpless from terror; those who could escape rushed away to the forests, secreting their property in the ground; what remained was left to fire and sword. Such boundless woe had never been witnessed in Russia. The surviving clergy throughout the country called on all to prepare for the last hour. The Mongols cut people down as a mower cuts grass. When they entered a province, they sent out detachments on every side; like locusts, they destroyed everything utterly. Monasteries and villages they stripped clean of all things that had value. From stores of grain they took what they needed, and burned the remainder, boasting that grass would not grow on their path. A great thaw saved Northwestern Russia. In the first days of March, the Mongols, when within a hundred versts of Novgorod, became alarmed by the swelling of rivers and turned back. Conducting their countless treasures and urging on long lines of prisoners, they moved swiftly southeastward to grass-growing regions. On the way they came to Koselsk, where they met a most stubborn resistance. A detachment attacked the town for forty-two days, but succeeded in storming the place only after reinforcements had been sent by Batu, who was enraged at this resistance. It was destroyed utterly, but its fame will never die in Russian history. Before the wooden walls of this city, the Mongols lost four thousand men and three princes. When at last they burst into the town, they were met by old and young, men and women, who rushed at them with knives, axes and other weapons, and fought with desperation from house to house, from street to street. Gradually forced back, they retired into the Kremlin, or fortress, and fought till the last man perished. Vassili, the little prince, who was very young, was drowned, it is said, in the blood of the people. The Mongols called this town “Mo balig” (town of woe), the same name which they gave Bamian of the Kwarezmian Empire, the place at which Moatagan, one of Jinghis Khan’s grandsons, fell pierced by an arrow, and where the young man’s mother, a daughter of Jinghis, rushed in at the head of ten thousand warriors and left nothing alive, not a man, woman or child, destroying even the dogs and cats, slaying everything in her vengeance.