12 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 69 



time it may be best to quote here from one of the foremost modern 

 Russian historians who gave this question particular attention ' : 



The exodus from Kievan Rus took two different directions, and flowed in 

 two different streams. Of these streams, one tended towards the West — 

 towards the region of the Western Bug, the upper portions of the Dniester 

 and Vistula, and the interior districts of Galicia and Poland . . . This west- 

 ward movement had a marked effect upon the fortunes of the two most out- 

 lying Russian provinces in that direction — namely, Galicia and Volhynia. 

 Hitherto their position in the political hierarchy of Russian territories had 

 always caused them to rank as lesser provinces, but now Galicia — one of the 

 remote districts allotted only to izgoi princes of the house of Yaroslav — rose 

 to be one of the strongest and most influential in all the southwestern region. 

 The " Slovo Polku Igorove" even speaks of the Galician Prince of its day 

 (Yaroslav the Prudent) as " rolling back the gates of Kiev," while, with the 

 end of the twelfth century, when Roman, son of Mstislav, had added the 

 province to his own principality of Volhynia, the combined state waxed so 

 great in population and importance that its princes became sufficiently rich 

 and powerful to gather into their hands the direction of the whole south- 

 western region, and even of Kiev itself. In fact, the Ancient Chronicle goes 

 so far as to describe Prince Roman as " the Autocrat of all the Russian land." 

 Probably, also, this inrush of Russian refugees into Galicia and Poland, ex- 

 plains the fact that annals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries frequently 

 refer to Orthodox churches as then existing in the province of Cracow and 

 other portions of the Southwest. 



The same migratory movement may serve to throw light upon a phenomenon 

 of great importance in Russian ethnography — namely, the formation of the 

 Little Russian stock. The depopulation of Dnieprian Rus which began in the 

 twelfth century was completed during the thirteenth by the Tartar invasions 

 which took place between the years 1229 and 1240. For a long period after 

 the latter date the provinces of ancient Rus, once so thickly peopled, remained 

 in a state of desolation. A Catholic missionary named Piano Carpini, who 

 traversed Kievan Rus in 1246, on his way from Poland to the Volga to preach 

 the Gospel to the Tartars, has recorded in his memoirs that, although the road 

 between Vladimir in Volhynia and Kiev was beset with perils, owing to the 

 frequency with which the Lithuanians raided that region, he met with no 

 obstacle at the hands of Russians — for the very good reason that few of them 

 were left alive in the country after the raids and massacres of the Tartars. 

 Throughout the whole of his journey across the ancient provinces of Kiev and 

 Periaslavl, he saw countless bones and skulls lying by the wayside or scattered 

 over the neighbouring fields, while in Kiev itself — once a populous and spacious 

 city — he counted only two hundred houses, each of which sheltered but a few 

 sorry inmates. During the following two or three centuries Kiev underwent 

 still further vicissitudes. Hardly had she recovered from the Tartar attacks 

 delivered prior to the year 1240 when (in 1299) she was ravaged afresh by 

 some of the scattered bands of Polovtsi, Pechenegs, Turks, and other bar- 



1 A History of Russia, by V. O. Kluchevsky, late professor of Russian His- 

 tory of the University of Moscow, 3 vol., 8°, Lond., 1911-13; I, 194-196. 



