It was the tragedy of Ukraine that this collapse came at the very period when the countries of the Roman Catholic West were struggling to their feet. Those years when the Middle Ages were at their height formed the darkest and most hopeless years in Ukrainian history. It was the time when the old nobility were largely lost to the life of the people and when in large numbers they accepted the Polish language and Polish customs. The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 deprived the people and their Orthodox Church of all contact with Eastern Christian culture and left them helpless, with their educational system in ruins, their political organization shattered, and their economic life in chaos. Then, if ever, it seemed likely that the country would be reduced to ignorant peasants destined to be absorbed by their conquerors and to pass away among the forgotten peoples of the world. The great movements of chivalry and the Renaissance which prepared the way for modern Europe could have no meaning for the helpless serfs and uneducated city people who formed almost all that was left of the once proud state of Kiev. It was then that out of these masses and the few nobles who still retained the national spirit and tradition there grew the surprising movement which revived the spirit of Ukrainian culture. It was then that the unsettled conditions on the frontier, the bold and hazardous life of opposition to the Asiatic invaders developed the Kozaks. On land and sea they fought and the exploits of the heroes of the Zaporozhian Sich with their wild and untamed democracy in the sixteenth century fitted in well with the sturdy sea-dogs of England who were proud to singe the beard of the King of Spain on all of the seven seas. The era of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, of the English fight against the Spanish Armada in the reign of Queen Elizabeth coincided exactly with the years when the Kozaks made their raids against the Turks and the Tatars, when they dared to burn and plunder the suburbs of Constantinople itself, and when the cry that the Kozaks were coming was enough to spread the alarm through all eastern Europe, wherever there was oppression and evil. The sixteenth century was an era all over Europe when men dared to fight and risk their lives for the religious and political ideas which they respected and in which they believed. It was an era of religious confusion and of change and although the problem in Ukraine was different, the same spirit that a little earlier had sent Christopher Columbus across the ocean, that inspired Cortez and Pizarro to conquer the Aztecs and the Incas, that explored the New World under terrific odds, saw the development of the democratic Kozak Host.