Several years of destruction and misery thus passed away, during which thousands of the helpless people perished in their blood, to decide questions of not the slightest moment to them.

The doom of the peasants was alike poverty and toil, whether one lord or another lord occupied the castle which overshadowed their huts.
The Dnieper was then the only channel through which commerce could be conducted between Russia and the Greek empire.

Barbaric nations inhabited the shores of this stream, and they had long been held in check by the Russian armies.

But now the kingdom had become so enfeebled by war and anarchy, all the energies of the Russian princes being exhausted in civil strife, that the barbarians plundered with impunity the boats ascending and descending the stream, and eventually rendered the navigation so perilous, that commercial communication with the empire was at an end.

The Russian princes thus debarred from the necessaries and luxuries which they had been accustomed to receive from the more highly civilized and polished Greeks, were impelled to measures of union for mutual protection.