Some Russian thinkers deem it advantageous for their country to have received its Christianity from Byzantium, and consider it an element of greater independence that the national Church never arrogated to itself the supremacy and dominion over the State. Let such advantages be judged by the rule of autocracy and the nullity of the Greek Church. The Catholic nations, being educated in a more spiritual and exalted idea of liberty, have never allowed that the monarch could be lord of the human conscience, and have never known that monstrous confusion of attributes which makes the sovereign absolute dictator of souls. The Crusade, that fecund movement which was the work of Rome, never spread over Russia; and when the Sclavs fell under the Tartar yoke, the rest of Europe left her to her fate. Russia's choice of this branch of the Christian religion was fatal to her dominion over other kindred Sclavs; for it embittered her rivalry with the Poles, and raised an insurmountable barrier between Russia and European civilization which was inseparably intertwined with the Catholic faith even in such phenomena as the Renaissance, which seems at first glance laic and pagan.
Nevertheless, so much of Christianity as fell to Russia through the accepted channel sufficed to open to her the doors of the civilized world, and to rouse her from the torpid sleep of the Oriental. It gave her the rational and proper form of family life as indicated by monogamy, whose early adoption is one of the highest and most distinguishing marks of the Aryan race; and instead of the savage chieftain surrounded by his fierce vassals always ready for rebellion and bloodshedding, it gave the idea of a monarch who lives as God's vicar upon the earth, the living incarnation of law and order,--an idea which, in times of anarchy and confusion, served to constitute the State and establish it upon a firm basis. Lastly, Russia owes to Christianity her ecclesiastical literature, the fount and origin of literary culture throughout Europe.
In the thirteenth century--that bright and luminous age, the time of Saint Thomas, of Saint Francis of Assisi, of Dante, of Saint Ferdinand--Russia was suddenly invaded by the Mongols, and, like locusts in a corn-field, those hideous and demoniacal foes fell upon her and made all Christendom tremble, so that the French historian Joinville records it as a sign of the coming of Antichrist. "For our sins the unknown nations covered our land," say the Russian chroniclers. Genghis Khan, after subduing all Asia, drew around him an immense number of tribes, and fell upon Russia with irresistible force, sowing the land with skulls as the flower of the field sows it with seeds, and compelling the once free and wealthy native Boyars to bring grist to the mill and serve their conquerors as slaves. The Russian towns and princes performed miracles of heroism, but in vain. The Tartar hordes, let loose upon those vast plains where their horses found abundant pasture, rolled over the land like an inundation. In a more varied country, more densely populated and with better communication, the Tartars would have been beaten back, as they were from Moravia. Again Nature's hand was upon the destinies of Russia; the topographical conditions laid her under the power of the Golden Horde.