In the meanwhile Poland, with its alliance with Lithuania, was rising to new heights. Proud of its western traditions, the reborn state wanted to know nothing of the culture of those peoples who had entered into it. It valued its contacts with Italy and the West. It sought to wipe out every trace of its connections with the east and the nobles and peasants of Rus’-Ukraine, with their Orthodox faith, seemed to them a reflection on the western character of Poland. Rus’-Ukraine was abandoned by all of its friends at the very moment when the Spanish traders and merchants were seeking a road to the riches of the Orient, when the new spirit and the teachers from the ruined Constantinople were leavening the whole of Europe, when in England the Wars of the Roses were wiping out the old feudal nobility and when everywhere new currents of life and of thought were changing the old system of society. None of these new and healthy currents could exert any appreciable influence upon the unfortunate state which five centuries earlier had been the cultural offshoot of the great Byzantine Empire. The fall of Constantinople deprived the people of Ukraine of their cultural and religious support. The patriarchs were so occupied with the heavy problems of personal survival that they had little or no time to think of the far distant Ukraine. There were few or no scholars to send there to carry on schools and to defend the faith. The people were left to themselves to supply their own cultural needs as best they could, for Moscow, even though it was the self-styled defender of Orthodoxy and the Third Rome, was not interested in any cultural development outside of its own restricted sphere and could listen gravely to an argument that it was a sin to write or think or add any knowledge to the world after the Seventh Oecumenical Council. This left Ukraine at the mercy of Poland and Lithuania. Galling as it was to be under the control of Lithuania, which had formerly ranked so low in comparison with Kiev, there were still compensations. Part of Lithuania was pagan but many of the lords were Orthodox, and Church Slavonic, especially in its White Ruthenian form, was really the language of the government records. No matter what was to come, it was possible, especially for the nobles and the educated, to be sure of a hearing and of their position in the ruling circles. It was far different in Poland. From its very beginning Poland had adopted the Roman Catholic faith and felt itself definitely part of the West. As such it had inherited the contempt for Orthodoxy that had been widely spread since the Fourth Crusade. Its kings and rulers were constantly seeking to eliminate from their body politic and their ruling class all those people who would not conform, and there was a steady pressure on the leading families and the leading ecclesiastics to enter the Roman Catholic Church.