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314 visits to pay homage to the Tartar Khans and enslaved, tortured, and massacred, the populace. Intermarriage between Russians and Tartars, both forcible and voluntary, became quite common. Asiatic customs, policies, methods of government, and criminal justice blotted out whatever Western culture had been acquired by Russia and reduced the Russians almost to the invaders' own level of barbarism. Yet in those dark times a line of shrewd princes at Moscow brought that obscure town to the forefront and made it Russia's rallying-point. From Moscow the final expedition against the Tartars was made in 1480, and their Khanates on the Volga were added to Russia some seventy years later. In 1547 John IV, the Terrible, was crowned Tsar of Russia, after more than two centuries of "gathering together of Russia" on the part of the Muscovite princes, in the course of which teachers, artisans, artists, and architects from Western Europe were brought in. In 1597 the peasants were fastened to the soil, serfdom was established, and in 1654 Little (Southern) Russia joined the realm of the Muscovite Tsars.

By the end of the seventeenth century Moscow had a large colony of foreigners skilled in all manner of trades, quartered in the so-called German ( = foreign) Village, a suburb of the capital. Here Peter the Great was initiated into European military methods and the art of navigation and conceived the idea of pursuing his studies in Holland incognito. On his return he made up his mind "to cut a window to Europe" by founding St. Petersburg (1703) and making it his capital. Peter I ruled Russia Uterally with a "big stick" and forced Western European dress, customs, schools, books, as well as a reformed alphabet, upon his unwilling subjects. His final triumph over that royal knight-errant, Charles XII of Sweden, made Russia a European power to be reckoned with, and Peter assumed the title of Emperor of all the Russias. During the reigns of his female successors, German influences