In 1276 Vasili Yaroslavitch was gathered to his fathers, and Dimitri came in, as peacefully as the proverbial lamb, to the possession of the Grand Principality and of Velikie Novgorod. Not long had he been on the throne ere the wildest anarchy broke out in his dominions; scarcely had the inevitable quarrel with Novgorod been smoothed over than civil war desolated the grand province. Andrei Aleksandrovitch, kniaz of the appanage of Gorodetz on the Volga, was brother to Dimitri--by the accident of birth a younger brother; an accident which he proposed to correct with the assistance of the Horde. In league with these formidable warriors and with his uncles Thedor and Mikhail, Andrei let slip the dogs of war on the unhappy province, and drove Dimitri from the field. After the Mongols had worked their will on the wretched inhabitants, and established Andrei as Grand Prince of a ravaged and depopulated territory, they retired with their booty and captives and left the two princes to fight out their own quarrels. [Sidenote: 1283] Andrei soon had to call them in again, and Dimitri, not to be outdone, played Mongol against Mongol, and secured the support of Nogai, the almost independent Khan of the Oukrain steppes. The people, as usual, suffered heavily at the hands of the nomad squadrons: the “Scourge of God” has a way of falling on the most innocent shoulders. The condition of the Russian peasant and tiller of the soil was at this time deplorable. Debarred from exercising his labour on the fertile, but robber-haunted lands of the south, he was obliged to struggle patiently with the mighty forces of the northern forests, like the Indian ryot fighting against the encroachments of the jungle; only in place of elephant, boar, and sambur, which ruin from time to time the fruits of the latter’s toil, the former had periodically to bewail the devastations of Kuman, Mongol, and, not seldom, Russian raiders.