and bearing the sacred ensigns of their religion, went in solemn processions through the towns, invoking the assistance of the Most High God to quell a revolt which threatened the submersion of their world. Andrei had tried to weld into a disciplined kingdom materials that were as yet only fitted for a modified anarchy, tempered by attachment to a loosely-ordered succession of princes; dreaming of despotism, he had at least died the death of a despot. And while they do to death the only prince who had shown them the way to the safety which lay in union and centralisation, far away on the banks of the Okon, in the desert region which borders Northern China and Manchuria, is growing from insignificance to an overmastering weight of supremacy the tribe, horde, locust-swarm of the swarthy Mongols. The disorders which marked the disappearance of Andrei’s overshadowing personality from the throne of Souzdal were soothed, after a long struggle between his reflucted kinsfolk, by the final establishment of Vsevolod, brother of the murdered prince, surnamed “Big-nest” in allusion to his large family.[29] Applying himself to the ordering of his own province, he meddled but languidly in the seething troubles of the Dniepr-watered principalities, where the house of Olgovitch was enjoying a fitful revival of importance. A scion of that strenuous family at this time embarked on an enterprise which, though fruitless from a military point of view, was crowned with a halo of glory and immortalised in an epic poem of great beauty. “The Song of the Expedition of Igor, Prince of Sieverski,” or, more shortly, the Song of Igor, one of the earliest Slavonic folk-songs that has been handed down from the dead past, has been translated into many languages, but never before into English, so that it is well worth reproducing in part in a history of Russian development. It deals with a campaign undertaken by Igor Sviatoslavitch, Prince of Severski, and his brother Vsevolod, against the Polovtzi in their own country, of its disastrous result, and the ultimate return of Igor. Brothers, were it not well that we, after the old custom, began the song of the unlucky campaign of Igor, the seed of Sviatoslav? That we celebrate him in the heroic songs of our time, and not in the manner of Bōyan? If the sage Bōyan wished to tune to one a song, it was as if a squirrel sprang up the tree, or a gray wolf hied along the plain, or a blue eagle soared to the clouds....