But where is the aim or interest in these minutely-recorded Russian struggles? Hidden away in the forests of Souzdal, perhaps, lies the embryo or germ of a state policy, if it ever be hatched into life. Meanwhile Russia is losing ground, literally and metaphorically, in many directions. Southward, as has been noticed, a broad zone of steppe, inhabited by Turko tribes, shuts her off from the coast cities of the Black Sea, where the pushing Genoese have ensconced their factories. Galicia, with its population of White Kroats, is becoming less Russian every day. Lit’uania, no longer held under by the neighbouring provinces, threatens to expand at their expense. The Baltic lands are drifting into Teutonic and Catholic hands. Velikie Novgorod herself, absorbed in the details of parochial administration, has let her magnificent foreign trade slip into the grip of strangers. For Novgorod was not, as Howorth imagines, “a famous member of the Hanseatic League”; the League, now beginning to play an important part in the annals of Northern Europe, merely had a factory and station there, as it had at London and Lisbon, and this factory speedily monopolised the oversea trade of the great Russian emporium; “during three centuries the Hanseatic League concentrated in her own hands all the external commerce of Northern Russia.”[37] Finally, on the eastern marches hovered the shadow of the late incursion, an incursion which might at any moment be repeated. While the war-clouds were lowering dark and ill-boding over the land, sank in the west that day-star of Russian chivalry, Mstislav Mstislavitch, more or less Prince of Galitz. [Sidenote: 1228] Brave as a boar in battle, in council he was about as intelligent; “nothing is sadder than victory, except defeat,” and with him certainly a success was almost as expensive as a reverse could have been. His brilliant achievements gained no advantage for his family or for Russia, and on his death Andrew, son of the Hungarian king of that name, stepped into the vacant sovereignty. This border province, with its involved political conditions, had a magnetic attraction for the more adventurous spirits among the Russian princes, and a candidate was ready to hand to dispute its possession in the person of Daniel Romanovitch of Volhynia. Just such another knight-errant as Mstislav, Daniel possessed more of the ability to seize the contested throne than the address to establish himself firmly on it. The son of an imperious and overbearing father, he had many enemies. Vladimir Rurikovitch of Kiev, for instance, had not forgotten that Roman had made his father assume the tonsure against his inclinations, and in pursuance of this bequeathed quarrel formed a league against Daniel, which included the Princes of Tchernigov and Pinsk, and of course the Polovtzi. By detaching Kotian, the celebrated Polovtzi Khan, from this confederation, Daniel was able to gain a complete victory over his enemies.