Gedimin sacked the town of Rositter and renounced the creed of the Christmen.[59] Catholic Europe was angry at this backsliding, if one may judge by the epithets showered on the half-saved soul; a depth of sorrowing wrath is revealed in the expressions “double-headed monster, abominable mockery of nature, precursor of Antichrist.” Much mud might they throw, bitterly might they anathematise in those far-off days, yet not thus does history remember the grand old pagan whose castle ruins crown the heights above the Vilia. In the year of Gedimin’s accession (1316) died Urii Lvovitch, of Galitz and Volhynia, who was succeeded in those fiefs by his sons Andrei and Lev respectively. Colourless princes, these latter representatives of the Roman-Mstislavitch family, known only to history by the alliance which the instinct of preservation led them to make with the Teutonic Order. That they both died in the year 1324 appears from a letter of the Polish King Ladislas to Pope John, in which that fact is mentioned; the two provinces devolved upon Urii Andreievitch, the last Russian Prince of Galicia, the last for many a hundred years who ruled Volhynia. His death (about 1336) ended the male line of his family, and left as heiress of Galitz his sister Mariya, who married the Polish prince, Troiden of Tchersk. By the marriage of another heiress, the daughter of Lev of Volhynia, with Loubart, a son of Gedimin, that province was brought into the Lit’uanian dominion, which was further extended by the succession of Olgerd (Gedimin’s eldest son) to the fief of his wife’s father the Prince of Vitebsk.[60] The annexation of Kiev, attributed by many historians to Gedimin, was undoubtably of a later date, as the Chronicles make mention of a Russian Prince Thedor, ruling in that city under Mongol supervision, as late as 1361.[61] Even so, the Russian lands owning the sovereignty of Gedimin--Polotzk, Pinsk, Tourov, Volhynia, Loutzk, and Vitebsk sufficiently justify his title, _rex Letwinorum et multorum Ruthenorum_, and the Grand-duchy of Lit’uania might claim to be more Russian than the Grand Principality of Souzdal, with its Slav-Finn-Turko population.