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He gave toleration to the idolaters who still existed, and when the people of Suzdal were about to massacre some hapless women whom they accused of having brought on a famine by sorcery, he stayed their hands and saved the poor victims from death.
And each time he remembered that incident, or spoke about it to his wife, tears would come to his eyes. FOURTEEN priests were kept in the Suzdal friary prison, chiefly for having been untrue to the orthodox faith. Isidor had been sent to that place also.
The princesses and all the nobles prayed Bishop Metrophanes to give them the tonsure; and when the Tartars rushed into the town by all its gates, the vanquished retired into the cathedral, where they perished, men and women, in a general conflagration. Suzdal, Rostoff, Yaroslavl, fourteen towns, and a multitude of villages in the grand principality were also given over to the flames, 1238.
After Isidor had had a talk with the metropolitan and with the attorney-general, he was immediately sent away to a friary, not his own, but one at Suzdal, which had a prison attached to it; the prior of that friary was now Father Missael. EVERY one tried to look as if Isidor's sermon contained nothing unpleasant, and nobody mentioned it.
It was in 1547 that Anastasia, of the House of Romanoff, had married Ivan IV. At about the same time her brother was married to a Princess of Suzdal, a descendant of the brother of Alexander Nevski. This Princess was the grandmother of Mikhail Romanoff, and the source from which has sprung the present ruling house in Russia.
So the conquest by the German Orders was added to the other woes by which Russia was rent and torn after the death of her Grand Prince at Suzdal. To us it all seems like an unmeaning panorama of chaos and disorder. But to them it was only the vicissitudes naturally occurring in the life of a great nation.
Meanwhile Yaroslaff, brother of the grand prince George II, was his successor in Suzdal. Yaroslaff, 1238-1246, found his inheritance in the most deplorable condition. The towns and villages were burned, the country and roads covered with unburied corpses; the survivors hid themselves in the woods. He recalled the fugitives and began to rebuild.
The "Mother of Russian Cities" was taken by assault, sacked and pillaged, and the Grand Principality ceased to exist. Russia was preparing to revolve around a new center in the Northeast; and with the new Grand Principality of Suzdal, far removed from Byzantine and Western civilizations, it looked like a return toward barbarism, but was in fact the circuitous road to progress.
In Suzdal also Alexander found himself in the presence of insolent victors and exasperated subjects. In 1262 the inhabitants of Vladimir, of Suzdal, of Rostof, rose against the collectors of the Tartar impost. The people of Yaroslavl slew a renegade named Zozimus, a former monk, who had become a Moslem fanatic. Terrible reprisals were sure to follow.
He removed his capital from the old town of Suzdal, which had its Vetché or popular assembly, to Vladimir, which had had none of these things, assigning as his reason, not that he intended to be sole master and free from all ancient trammels but that the Mother of God had come to him in a dream and commanded him so to do! But an end came to all his dreams and ambitions.
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