Yet in the seventeenth century at the time of the temporary flourishing of the Hetmanate, Ukrainian scholarship and spirit won one of its most signal victories. Moscow during its long period of subjugation to the Tatars had lost touch with the outside world, and its relations even with the Orthodox Churches of the east had become limited to a mere readiness to give liberally to the wandering Patriarchs who came to collect donations. The dangerous legend of the Third Rome and the accompanying belief that Moscow was the centre of Christian civilization had taken root, and the Muscovite scholars, if they could be called such, objected to all contact with the rest of Europe. Kiev was a possible exception, for the princes of Muscovy still had a traditional respect for the city and its culture. When the tsars finally realized that they needed some outside learning, it was the scholars trained in the Academy at Kiev who were called in to assist. Some of these were invited to Moscow. Others went to escape Polish pressure. Yet all that was done in the way of intellectual progress was done by these men. The reforms in the Russian Church, incomplete as they were, were spurred on by the Kievan scholars and it was they also who inspired the beginnings of Russian literature, halting as they were. Not enough attention has been paid to this movement and to the influence that Kiev exerted upon Moscow during the seventeenth century. It was a time when Russian military power was making itself supreme but in the world of culture it was the scholarship of Ukraine that was the master. The names of men from Kiev appear with monotonous regularity as the intellectual leaders of Moscow. Many of the greater Muscovites studied at Kiev and it is not too much to say that if Kiev had given Moscow its intellectual start at its foundation, so again in the seventeenth century it was Kiev that started the northern country on its return to Western intellectual ways.