Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/186

 16(3 THE DECLINE AND FALL ings of the fathers were ti'anslated into the Sclavonic idiom ; and three hundred noble youths were invited or compelled to attend [Taro3iav. tlic Icssons of tlic collc^e of Jaroslaus.^'^^ It should appear that A D 1015-l0o41 r^i Russia might have derived an early and rapid improvement from her peculiar connection with the church and state of Constan- tinople ^'^~ which in that age so justly despised the ignorance of the Latins. But the Bjzantine nation was servile, solitax'y, and verging to an hasty decline ; after the fall of Kiow, the naviga- tion of the Borysthenes was forgotten ; the great princes of Wolodomir and Moscow were separated from the sea and Christendom ; and the divided monarchy was oppressed by the ignominy and blindness of Tartar servitude, i"* The Sclavonic and Scandinavian kingdoms, which had been converted by the Latin missionaries, were exposed, it is true, to the spiritual jurisdiction and temporal claims of the popes ; ^^-^ but they were united, in language and religious worship, with each other, and with Rome ; they imbibed the free and generous spirit of the European re- public, and gradually shared the light of knowledge which arose on the western world. was built at Novgorod on the pattern of the Kiev church by his son Vladimir in 1045.] 106 [Por Yaroslav's taste for books, see Nestor, c. 55.] M' [It is important to notice the growth of monasticism in Russia in the nth century. The original hearth and centre of the movement was at Kiev in the Pestcherski or Crypt Monastery, famous for the Saint Theodosius [ob. 1074] whose biography was written by Nestor. Kostomarov (<?/. cif. p. 18 Si/t/.) has a readable chapter on the subject.] i"*^ The great princes removed in 1156 from Kiow, which was ruined by the Tartars in 1240. Moscow became the seat of empire in the xivth century. See the first and second volumes of Levesque's History, and Mr. Coxe's Travels into the North, tom. i. p. 241, &c. i^^The ambassadors of St. Stephen had used the reverential expressions of regnitvi oblatum, debitavi obedientiam, &c. which were most rigorously interpreted by Gregory VII. ; and the Hungarian Catholics are distressed between the sanctity of the pope and the independence of the crown (Katona, Hist. Critica, tom. i. p. 20-21;, tom. ii. p. 304, 346, 360, &c.).