great body of the people, the citizens and traders, then the peasant,
and last of all the slave.

Yaroslaf, the "legislator," known as the Charlemagne of Russia, died in
the year 1054. The Eastern and Western Empires, long divided in
sentiment, were that same year separated in fact, when Pope Leo VI.
excommunicated the whole body of the Church in the East.

With the death of Yaroslaf the first and heroic period in Russia
closes. Sagas and legendary poems have preserved for us its grim
outlines and its heroes, of whom Vladimir, the "Beautiful Sun of Kief,"
is chief. Thus far there has been a unity in the thread of Russian
history--but now came chaos. Who can relate the story of two centuries
in which there have been 83 civil wars--18 foreign campaigns against
one country alone, not to speak of the others--46 barbaric invasions,
and in which 293 Princes are said to have disputed the throne of Kief
and other domains! We repeat: Who could tell this story of chaos; and
who, after it is told, would read it?

It was a vast upheaval, a process in which the eternal purposes were
"writ large"--too large to be read at the time. It was not intended
that only the fertile Black Lands along the Dnieper, near to the
civilizing center at Constantinople, should absorb the life currents.
All of Russia was to be vitalized; the bleak North as well as the
South; the zone of the forests as well as the fertile steppes. The
instruments appointed to accomplish this great work were--the disorder
consequent upon the reapportionment of the territory at the death of
each sovereign--the fierce rivalries of ambitious Princes--and the
barbaric encroachments to which the prevailing anarchy made the South
the prey.