; Mes ies a

predicted, it was a bloody encounter. After an all d

battle, the Mongols fled leaving, we are told, a hundr
thousand dead on the field. But the Russians as well
had suffered terribly. The bodies of the two warrior —
monks were found, one of them locked in a death |
embrace with a giant warrior of the Khan. Dmitri —
himself was unharmed, although he had been in the
hottest of the fighting. From this time he bore the
surname Donskoi (of the Don), in remembrance of the _
famous victory. The event marked an epoch in Rus- ~
sian history. Although the Tatars came back once more
to wreak vengeance upon Moskow, still the century-
long tradition of slavery to the Mongols was broken,
and the way paved for the final bursting of their chains. —
When Dmitri died in 1389 he left a territory larger _
than had ever before been the appanage of a Prince of —
-Moskow. Under his reign Stephen had gone out to —
conquer the district of Perm for the Church and al-
though that territory formally acknowledged the power
of the Prince of Moskow only under Ivan the Third,
just after our period, still the seed of a united Russia
was sown. Dmitri’s successors for nearly a hundred ~
years gradually extended this territory and power —
until it formed a rough half-circle drawn from Moskow
as the center, with the distance to Nijni Novgorod —
as its radius. West of Moskow the Prince’s power did
not extend far; there were the rival princedoms of —
Galicia and Latvia. But all centered at Moskow. There
too, the Church had its capital and the ties which bound
the Russians to their Church were soon to become almost
identical with those that bound them into a nation.
Two other events must be noted in closing this
period when the Russian Metropolitans were still
appointed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, both
of importance to Russia, although occurring outside
its borders. The first was the Council of Florence,
1439, when in a frantic effort to get Western help to
save his tottering empire from the Saracens, John V,