mined, and his assaults repulsed. After many failures to take the town, when solicited to raise the siege, he vowed that he would stay there three years rather than not succeed. Yet, foiled he must have been, had not a treacherous monk within the city-(his name, reserved for execration, was Anastasius)—shot an arrow into the hostile camp with information of certain underground aqueducts which supplied the town from the east with water. Vladimir lost no time in cutting off these channels, and the town was forced to capitulate. He received the city as a gift of God, celebrated his victory by being baptized and married, and in token of his clemency and thankfulness he at once restored the town to the Emperor. On the heights overhanging the quarantine harbour, among the ruins of Cherson, still stand the remains of the Church of Vladimir, probably marking the very spot where the Russian chieftain received the seal of his Christian adoption. The tribe soon followed the example of their monarch; Kieff was erected into a metropolitan city, and the Russian Church, tracing thus its birth to Cherson, was

for 700 years in filial dependence on the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The migration westward still continued up to the arrival of the Mogul Tartars in 1237. Following the law that ruled them, the successive families of the Hunnish stock displaced each one the other that had preceded it. Thus, by the tenth century, the Petschénégues had supplanted the Chazares in the Crimea: and they in their turn were forced to yield before the Comanes in the eleventh. Of these tribes little needs to be said; but the latter requires to be named, because, under its rule, that enterprising power of the West, the ambitious Genoa, was first permitted to obtain a footing in the peninsula, where by degrees it acquired that arbitrary and unscrupulous sway which it maintained for 300 years over the towns and principalities of the southern coast.

F

IV.

THE GENOESE PERIOD.

The spirit of commerce which awoke, as from a slumber, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, brought the rising maritime powers of Venice and Genoa into conflict in the Black Sea.

For some centuries before, the west of Europe had been paralysed by the invasions of the barbarians in the north and the Saracens in the south. The lethargy was first broken by the Crusades. By the contact into which the rude warriors of the West were thus brought with the treasures of art, and learning, and ancient splendour, which were found in rich but decaying grandeur at Constantinople, a new sense and new tastes were engendered, which they carried back to their native lands. And hence, on their return, there speedily arose, in all the chief capitals of Europe, a body of citizen

merchants to supply the wants which then began to be felt.

But the great emporium through which the vast natural riches and works of industry of the East had been supplied to feed the luxury or avarice of the West had been destroyed. That emporium was Alexandria, so celebrated for its wealth, its commerce, its learning, its philosophers, its Christian schools, and its fate. The savage and remorseless invasion of the Saracens in the seventh century had reduced that splendid capital, with its priceless library, to ashes, and with its fall the market of the West was closed, while, under the terror and distraction caused by the Mahometan arms, all commerce languished.

But the adventurous spirit of trade is not easily checked, and it soon opened for itself a communication with the East. That route was across the continent from the Indus to the Oxus, by Carisme and the Caspian to the Black Sea. By this track, up to the period when the passage by the Cape of Good Hope was discovered, the caravans bore their precious stores of silks,

gems, and spices, and discharged them at Tana (Azoff), Trebizond, and Phasis, to be thence transported to Constantinople, which thus took the place of Alexandria in the commerce of Europe.

The Crimea felt early the impulse of this rising spirit, and trade began to develop itself on its southern coast.

Hitherto Cherson had almost monopolized the Asiatic traffic; but from the year A.D. 1070 two formidable rivals sprang up, in the towns of Sudak and Kaffa, which were occupied by Greek adventurers, and threatened to absorb its

commerce.

In vain the Chersonites appeal for protection to the Greek Emperor. He was either unwilling or too feeble to grant it. The discontented republic rebelled, and brought more trouble upon itself, until, about the year 1201, not only the Greek traders, but the rival powers of Venice and Genoa, had fairly settled on the shores of the Crimea and the Sea of Azoff. From that time that ancient republic, so full of interest if not of glory, maintained only a lingering exist