on their steeds in hopes of reaching the Dnieper.

Six princes and seventy of the chief boyars or _voievodes_ remained on
the field of battle. It was the Crécy and Poitiers of the Russian
chivalry. Hardly a tenth of the army escaped; the Kievians alone left
ten thousand dead. The Grand Prince of Kiev, however, Mstislaf
Romanovitch, still occupied a fortified camp on the banks of the
Kalka. Abandoned by the rest of the army, he tried to defend himself.
The Tartars offered to make terms; he might retire on payment of a
ransom for himself and his _droujina_. He capitulated, and the
conditions were broken. His guard was massacred, and he and his two
sons-in-law were stifled under planks. The Tartars held their festival
over the inanimate bodies, 1224.

After this thunderbolt, which struck terror into the whole of Russia,
the Tartars paused and returned to the East. Nothing more was heard of
them. Thirteen years passed, during which the princes reverted to
their perpetual discords. Those in the northeast had given no help to
the Russians of the Dnieper; perhaps the grand prince George II of
Suzdal[58] may have rejoiced over the humiliation of the Kievians and
Galicians. The Mongols were forgotten; the chronicles, however, are
filled with fatal presages: in the midst of scarcity, famine and
pestilence, of incendiaries in the towns and calamities of all sorts,
they remark on the comet of 1224, the earthquake, and eclipse of the
sun of 1230.

The Tartars were busy finishing the conquest of China, but presently
one of the sons of Genghis, Ugudei, sent his nephew Batu to the West.
As the reflux of the Polovtsi had announced the invasion of 1224, that
of the Saxin nomads, related to the Khirghiz who took refuge on the