Saturday 31 May 2014
At the time the Rus were divided into many different principalities, chief amongst which was Kiev.
These banded together to make a stand against the Mongols and form the first line of defence for Europe against the hordes of the Khans.
Not surprisingly, given the unstoppable nature of the Mongol advance, the Russians were utterly defeated.
Though the Mongols were to penetrate deep into Europe, overrunning Poland and reaching as far as Silesia at Liegnitz, where they defeated a combined German and Polish force, they soon withdrew eastwards again.
Hungary and Poland regained their lands, though they were devastated. Russia was not so lucky.
The Mongols remained on the steppes to the south, and moved there in large numbers. Descendents of the Mongols can still be found there today, called the Tartars, so called by the Slavs because they supposedly originated from Tartarus, the Greco-Roman word for Hell.
Their prolonged presence greatly impacted the development of Russian history. Mongol dress and culture hugely influenced Russian styles, where men wore long beards and large fur coats. Mongolian gutul were very popular amongst Russians for centuries.
This gave Russia a very non-European feel, contributing to isolation and a distinctive identity among Russians. Europeans did not consider them to be part of their culture, or only imperfectly juxtaposed with it. The Russians themselves regarded themselves as something other than European. Many Russians do even today.
The oriental despotism of the early Tsars was ended by Peter, who looked out beyond the parochial backwardness of the Russian people to Europe, especially Germany, and the Romanov dynasty was soon to become so thoroughly German as to be virtually indistinguishable from the Habsburgs or Hohenzollerns.
But despite their reforms and the tendency of the nobility to emulate the new Tsarist fashion, the mass of the people remained very much like they had been under the Mongol yoke.
Ivan the Terrible destroyed the Khan of Kazan, but it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the last of the Khans, those of the Crimea, were at last conquered by Russia in the reign of Catherine the Great.
By that time much historical development had occurred. The steppes, as a result of oppressive Mongol rule, and later constant Tartar raids, had been left horribly underpopulated. The roving bands of nomadic Cossacks, hardly different from Mongols themselves, began to settle there.
These people eventually became the Ukrainians. The Slavs farther north, in the forests of Moscow and Novgorod, had led an isolated existence separate from the western Slavs like the Poles, and from the Ukrainians. They continued to call themselves Russians, and it was they who eventually created the Russian Empire and settled Siberia.
This separate historical evolution was to have dire consequences for the Rus in the future. Though they spoke related languages, the Ukrainians gradually came to see themselves as separate people. Tsarist authorities continued to insist that Ukrainians were really just Russians. Often to differentiate, the authorities referred to those of the north and Siberia as "Great Russians," while referring to the Ukrainians of the steppe as "Little Russians."
In addition, the defeat of the Russians and the subsequent decline of the Mongol Khans permitted the extraordinary expansion of the Lithuanians. The Rus in the northern forests west of the Dnieper fell to the armies of Mindaugas and Algirdas.
The union between Lithuania and Poland perpetuated this separation of the so-called White Russians, centred around Minsk, from the Great Russians around Moscow.
Like the Ukrainians, this separate historical path resulted in the creation of a new ethnicity, the Belarussians, bel being the Slavic root for white, thus, White Russians. And Belarus is now an independent nation separate from Russia.
So we see that the defeat of the Rus at Kalka had enormous and decisive influence on their historical evolution. The unity of the Mediaeval Rus was broken forever. The steppes were depopulated, the people driven into the forests where they were isolated from Europe, and the conquests of the Lithuanians isolated those in the west from those in the east.
At the same time as the Rus was irrevocably divided between the Belarussians, the Russians, and the Ukrainians, Russian culture became profoundly influenced by the Mongols and took on a sharply divergent character from that of the rest of Europe, contributing much to Russia's semi-oriental appearance and delayed social, political, and economic progress, which has been consistently behind the rest of Europe ever since.
Pictured is a painting by Periklis Deligiannis depicting the capture of the Russian princes after their defeat on the River Kalka.
- Kaiser
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