It was a sad time for the people. The glories of the past were gone and they scarcely lived on, even in the memories of the people. No one could have recognized in the wretched, depopulated country the once proud state of Kievan Rus’, which had been acknowledged two centuries before as an equal of all of the countries of Europe. CHAPTER FOUR _THE CULTURAL REVIVAL_ The fifteenth century opened on a ruined state of Rus’-Ukraine. There was nothing left of the old authority of the state. Its independence and its wealth were gone and its people had only to remain quiet and to follow as mute observers the changing pattern of history, for the fifteenth century saw the beginnings of modern Europe; it saw the discovery of America, the enormous expansion of Poland and the independence of Moscow from the Tatar yoke. Mediaeval Europe was passing into the modern era and Rus’-Ukraine, gone from the map, could only look on without comprehension. Everything seemed against the unfortunate people, for the two great events of the period worked to the disadvantage of the enslaved Ukrainians. First came the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire had been gradual. Step by step the Turks had pushed nearer to the great capital. They had conquered one province after another, until only the city itself was left upon the Golden Horn in a splendid isolation. It was in vain that the Emperors had appealed to the West for military assistance to ward off the final doom. They secured no answer. At the Council of Florence in 1439, they had made their submission to the Pope but even this brought them no practical benefit, for the age of the Crusades had passed. No one of the secular rulers who were busy carving out states for themselves was willing to hear the appeal of Rome to divert even a small part of their energies and resources to the saving of what had been the great centre of Christianity. Almost simultaneously with this, Ivan III of Moscow threw off the yoke of the Golden Horde and Moscow became a free state for the first time in two centuries. By his marriage with a member of the Paleolog dynasty of Constantinople, Ivan secured a shadowy claim to the double headed eagles of Byzantium. He and his followers became enthused with the idea that they were the lineal descendants of the Empire and that Moscow was now the Christian capital of the world, the Third Rome, entitled to recover its ancestral heritage and to shine forth in new glory. It was a proud ambition for the isolated state which had been orientalized by submission to the Mongols and Tatars and had sunk in all cultural matters far below its original source.