and attempts to capture Constantinople. winter season, over the hard and level surface of boundless snows. From the neighbourhood of that city, the Russians descended the streams that fall into the Borysthenes; their canoes, of a single tree, were laden with slaves of every age, furs of every species, the spoil of their bee-hives, and the hides of their cattle; and the whole produce of the north was collected and discharged in the magazines of Kiow." Thence, after many perils, they ultimately reached Constantinople, and exchanged their cargoes for the produce and manufactures of Greece, and often for the spices of India. A few of their countrymen settled in the capital and the provinces, under full protection of their persons and effects; but they soon abused the hospitality of the Greeks, by inciting those whom they had left behind to make no less than four attacks on the capital city during the first two hundred years of their settlement. They had seen, tasted, and envied the wealth of Constantinople; and then, as in more recent times, they hoped to revel in luxuries they were too barbarous to obtain by honest trade.
Their ships. The vessels used in their first onslaught were in the form of canoes, scraped out of the long stem of a beech or willow tree. "This slight and narrow foundation," says Gibbon, "was raised and continued on either side with planks, till it attained the length of sixty, and the height of about twelve feet. These boats were built without a deck, but with two rudders and a mast, to move with sails and oars, and to contain from forty to seventy men, with their arms and provisions of fresh water and salt fish."[1] In their
- ↑ Gibbon, c. lv.
