crosses embroidered upon the shoulder of their white mantles. Then
another order was created (1225), the "Teutonic Order," wearing black
crosses on their shoulders, which, after fraternizing with the Livonian
Knights, was going to absorb them--together with some other
things--into their own more powerful organization. Russia had no armed
warriors to meet these steel-clad Germans and Livonians. She had no
orders of chivalry, had taken no part in the Crusades, the far-off
echoes of which had fallen upon unheeding ears. The Russians could
defend with desperate courage their own flimsy fortifications of wood,
earth, and loose stones; but they could not pull down with ropes the
solid German fortresses of stone and cement, and their spears were
ineffectual upon the shining armor. Their conquest was inevitable; the
conquered territory being divided between the knights and the Latin
Church. So Königsberg and many other Russian towns were captured and
then Teutonized, by joining them to the cities of Lubeck, Bremen,
Hamburg, etc., in the "Hanseatic League."

This conquest was of less future importance to Russia than to Western
Europe. It contained the germ of much history. The territory thus
wrested from Russia became the German state of Prussia; and a future
master of the Teutonic order, a Hohenzollern, was in later years its
first King; and this was the beginning of the great German Empire which
confronts the Empire of the Czar to-day.

So the conquest by the German Orders was added to the other woes by
which Russia was rent and torn after the death of her Grand Prince at
Suzdal. To us it all seems like an unmeaning panorama of chaos and
disorder. But to them it was only the vicissitudes naturally occurring
in the life of a great nation. They were proud of their nationality,
which had existed nearly as long as from Columbus to our own day. They