look up to them as its national leaders. Because of the clashes with Kiev all they succeeded in doing was in preparing the whole section for easy devastation by the barbarians.
In 1169 Andrew Kitan, the prince of the newly formed Finno-Slavonic Duchy of Muscovy, stormed the ramparts of the Ukrainian capital and conquered it.
By 1240 the Tatars completed the devastation, begun by the Muscovites, of the Dnieperian Ukraine, so that it was turned into sparsely populated disunited provinces paying tribute to the Tatars.
Halich and afterwards Lviw (Lemberg) chief towns of Western Ukraine now took the place of Kiev.
The most celebrated rulers of the period were Roman (1199-1206) and his son Danilo. If it had not been for king Roman’s successful amalgamation of the provinces of Galicia, Volhynia (Lodomeria), Kholm and Podolia, the whole heritage of Volodimir the Great might have right then passed into the hands of the Tatars or the Muscovites. His dominions were still the largest, territorially, in all of Europe, stretching between the Carpathians and the Dnieper and reaching in the south as far as the shores of the Black Sea and the mouth of the Danube. Roman was the first of the Galician princes to be called “Lord of all Ruthenia”. For a brief period after his death reigned Hungarian and Polish princes who were related to the Galician dynasty.
Roman’s son Danilo (1228-1264) was the last of the rulers of ancient Ruthenia. His death spelled the end of Ukraine’s political independence.
Harassed by the Tatars, it was easy for Poles and Lithuanians to annex separately and independently the various parts of Ukrainian territory. While the Poles’ chief interest was in Galician and neighboring provinces, the Lithuanians centered their attention upon the lands lying between the latter and the river Dnieper. In 1568 they formed a federated state
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