Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN ATJTOCBACY When the twelfth century dawned upon Europe, the Russian Slavs had made unmistakable progress towards a unified national life. In numerous struggles with the Finnish, Tatar, and Tatar-Turkish tribes to the east, at whose expense they were continually enlarging the "Russian boundaries, they had shown their ability and willingness to unite, when occasion demanded, in assertion of the nation's interests. Yet they were still far from being at peace among themselves. This is well shown by Pogodin's estimate that, in the 170 years subsequent to the death of Yaroslav, in 1054, Russia was the scene of eighty-three civil wars, and that the possession of the various principalities was contested in that period no fewer than 293 times. The chief source of disorder was, of course, the udyelny system, which provided no undisputed authority in the land that everybody was bound to acknowledge, and which had such little legal effect that every prince practically claimed the right to interpret it in his own way,and as his own interests dictated. Yet there were sources of conflict other than the mere interpretation of the udyelny system; for it must be borne in mind that under the appearance of a single political type — the system of federated principalities, as the udyelny arrangements might be called — three sets of political ideas were struggling for the mastery: the Slavonic custom, which prevailed before the arrival of the Varyags, of bestowing the highest dignity in the gift of the gens, or family, upon its eldest member; the Scandinavian system, brought over by the Norsemen, of dividing out the land to the successors of the prince; and the western theory, imported into Russia by way of Byzantium, which claimed the inheritance for the prince's eldest s...