They returned in 1240 under the Khan Batu and this time the Mongols and Tatars came to stay. They sacked and burned Chernihiv and on December 6, 1240 they captured Kiev and ended the old mediaeval state. It was a terrible and thorough sacking of Kiev and Rus’. When it was over, the cities were mere shells, the princes annihilated, the land desolate. Apparently in their misery the ordinary people rose against the princes at the same time and sought to take vengeance upon their former lords. At the same time the princes of Suzdal and Moscow led the procession of nobles who were willing to accept the Mongol Tatar overlordship to maintain their thrones. They willingly submitted and for two centuries Moscow, for good or ill, formed part of the Mongolian Empire and later of its westernmost section, the Golden Horde, with its capital at Saray near Kazan on the Volga River. Moscow rapidly became Asianized, its princes married Mongol girls, and whatever had remained of the old traditions was swallowed up in the new order. The hope of an independent Rus’ remained only in the West where the princes of Halich endeavored to increase their power. It was a truncated state that they dominated. Without the rich hinterland of the Dnyeper basin and the regions to the east, they were isolated among the western states which had already come into existence and which formed part of the Western Roman Catholic world. The Orthodox state of Rus’ was closely surrounded by Poland and Hungary which had already succeeded in acquiring control of that section of Rus’ which was in the Carpathian Mountains. Separately or together, Poland and Hungary intrigued against or fought with the Princes of Halich and by the middle of the fourteenth century Poland succeeded in acquiring the control of Galicia. In the meanwhile there had come the rise of Lithuania in the north. A series of able princes pushed their way south through White Ruthenian territory and later acquired control of Volynia and Podolia. The rulers of Lithuania were either pagan or Orthodox. The White Ruthenian Church Slavonic became their court language and the language of official business. All this won for them a sympathetic hearing from the dismembered principalities of Rus’, especially as the rule of the Lithuanians was little harsher than had been the rule of their own princes in the later days. By the end of the fourteenth century, the old state of Rus’ had lost all its independence. It was formally divided between Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, and the rulers of these countries fought over its possessions. Only in Lithuania was there a semblance of the old rule, for it was only there that any of the princes were able to maintain their prestige and some shreds of their power. Everywhere else, a new order had been introduced and the princes had been compelled to submit or vanish into obscurity.