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Rh colony, and imposed foreign laws and foreign customs. For two centuries, reckoning from the disaster of the Kalka (1224), it bowed the country down under all the weight of an Eastern tornado. It was only towards the close of the fifteenth century that the Muscovite princes, taking advantage of the slow crumbling of the Mongol Empire, felt strong enough to cast off the yoke. They had laboured, meanwhile, to bring together some neighbouring colonies, first, and then some other remnants, relatively near, of the ancient Russian fatherland, and thus had gathered them up a new empire, and endowed Russia with a new home. Novgorod had been theirs since 1478; Tver, Rostov, Jaroslav, soon joined them. Ivan III.—the Great, as he has been justly called—added more territory, which had not been included within the boundaries of Ancient Russia, pushing the frontiers of New Russia as far as Finland, the White Sea, and the frozen seas to the north, and towards the Ural on the east. His son Vassili added Riazan and Novgorod Siéverskiï, to the south. Did all this constitute a country in the historical meaning of that word? Not yet!

When he succeeded to the throne, in 1533, Ivan IV.—the Terrible—inherited a territory already extensive, but which, geographically speaking, lacked unity and harmony. The tumult of battle, the confusion of conquest, were apparent everywhere. It was a scene of spoils scattered broadcast. Around the Muscovite nucleus in the centre had been grouped, in constantly broadening eccentric circles, territories which, for the most part, had no resemblance, even, to provinces, and can only be designated by topographical indications: the Governments of Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Olonetz to the north-east; those of Novgorod and Pskov to the north-west; to the west and south-west, the region of the Dnieper, and the present Government of Smolensk, the western portion of the present Government of Kaluga, part of that of Tchernigov, and the western parts of those of Orel and Kursk; north-east lay the Steppe country, without any definite southern frontier, and for its northern limit the 55th parallel—the northern boundary, in other words, of the present Governments of Kaluga, Tula, Riazan, Tambov, Penza, and Simbirsk; and, lastly, to the east, the basin of the Kama and its tributaries, the Viatka, the Tshoussova, and the Biela.

A singularity which in itself paints the nature of this settlement is that its most recent and distant conquests, Novgorod and Pskov, with their dependencies, were its most important constituents; for these included the industrial and commercial