Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/455

Rh This expanded Slavia has indeed the most manifold varieties of climate and soil, yet it forms a contrast to its little nucleus Polesie, the cradle of the Slavs. The latter scattered the inhabitants and isolated them in small villages, whereas the water-network of all the rest of Russia connects even the most distant peoples. It would indeed be easier to go from Lake Ladoga to the Black Sea than from many a Polesian village to the next.

The whole of Russia forms an enormous plain, so that there is nothing to hinder the icy north winds. The Sea of Azov and the northern part of the Caspian are ice-locked; the winter is terribly cold in the south, and the south winds bring burning hot summer days to the distant north. Thus the climate is everywhere the same and thoroughly continental in its extreme severity. In the northern region of the expanded Slav territory the Valdai hills are the watershed of the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas. The river basins of the Lovat, Volga, Don, Dnieper, Dwina are however so entangled and, in consequence of the slight gradients, their streams are navigable so far up-stream, that it is only necessary to drag a boat on land over the low narrow watersheds in order to reach the Black Sea or the Caspian from the Baltic by the Ladoga Sea. Similarly, from the Memel-Niemen basin the Dnieper can be reached, from the Dnieper the Volga or the Don, from the Don the Volga, or the Volga from the Dwina. A thousand years ago Russia was even better watered, but since this time many rivers mentioned by the chroniclers as formerly navigable have been dried up by reckless disforesting. This network of rivers, as if created for primitive commerce, is the most magnificent on the face of the earth, and in spite of its inhospitable climate it would certainly have nurtured the highest civilisation, had not its southern entrances been situated in the grass steppe by the Black and Caspian Seas, the domain of the mounted nomads, the arch-enemies and stiflers of all growing civilisation.

Fifteen hundred years ago the Pontus steppe was still grass steppe as far as the northern limit of the black earth (on the Dnieper as far as Kiev), not till later was it divided by the advance of the forest into a northern tree steppe, and a southern grass steppe zone. The Don divides the Pontus steppe transversely: as a rule one people dwelt west of the Don to the mouth of the Danube, and another east of the Don to the Caucasus. Towards the Caspian Sea the steppe becomes very salt, and in further curving round the Caspian it passes into the Central Asiatic steppe and desert zone, the ancient domain of the mounted nomads. So often as these were stirred by internal commotion, the hordes that were from neolithic times onward driven out sought refuge and a new home in the Pontus steppe. As early as the Iliad "mare-milking" mounted nomads were known there. At the time of Herodotus the Scythians had dwelt for centuries west of the Don, and the Sarmatae east of it, enjoying a long interval of peace, during which