The prize for which all the princes contended was Kiev. Every ambitious ruler sought to secure the coveted capital. Their efforts exhausted the country and seriously weakened it against outside aggression. There were too many cases where dissatisfied and struggling princes were only too willing to seek foreign aid and make alliances with one of the western powers or, still worse, with the nomads of the steppes, who always proved themselves unreliable allies and often inflicted upon their friends as much damage as they did upon the enemies against whom their efforts were directed. This was bad in the eleventh century, but in the twelfth there was an almost continuous civil war and within a century more than thirty princes had sat upon the throne at Kiev. Under such conditions it was only natural that there should be a division of the state. Certain rulers, wearied of the dangerous lures of ambition, set themselves to secure their own territory safely, even if they were forced to act as completely independent rulers and to flout the orders of the central authority. Galicia, the westernmost portion of the state of Rus’, was the first to assume practical independence. After the time of Yaroslav the Wise, the princes of this area set themselves up as provincial rulers and devoted all their energies to strengthening their own positions at home and abroad. They tried to keep out of the tangled intrigues for the possession of Kiev and they worked equally to keep the other princes from interfering with their own area, so that the province enjoyed relative peace for some centuries. It was not until the destruction of Kiev by the Tatars in the thirteenth century that they sought to make their authority paramount over the entire country. The example of Galicia was followed by the princes of Chernihiv and by many others, so that the original unity of Rus’ vanished amid the flames of civil war or in aristocratic anarchy. The ruin was accelerated by the appearance of the Polovtsy, another Turkic tribe, which was far more military and far more ably led than had been the Pechenegs. During the whole of the twelfth century, they ravaged the country almost at will and they were sure to find as allies some of the warring princes who were willing to enlist their aid for shortsighted personal advantage against other members of their own people. The damage which the Polovtsy did was well pictured in the _Song of the Armament of Ihor_. This is a unique work of the twelfth century and represents the only surviving specimen of the court poetry of the day. The unknown poet, in picturing the evils that disorder has brought upon the state, looks back to the whole history of Kiev and of Rus’, glorifies the princes of old and mourns the destruction of that splendid state which had been erected by Volodymyr and Yaroslav.