Hundreds of nobles and princes were inflamed with the ambition for supremacy, and with the sword alone could the path be cut to renown.

The wages offered the soldiers, on all sides, was pillage.

Cities were everywhere sacked and burned, and the realm was crimsoned with blood.

Civil war is necessarily followed by the woes of famine, which woes are ever followed by the pestilence.
The plague swept the kingdom with terrific violence, and whole provinces were depopulated.

In the city of Kief alone, seven thousand perished in the course of ten weeks.