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When Oleg's successor Igor was killed in battle by a tribe known as the Drevlianians, his widow Olga took over in 945 and reigned for the next 17 years, thus becoming the first celebrated Russian woman. When the Drevlianian prince proposed that she marry him, she asked him to send envoys to bring her to him by boat; she then had the envoys and their boat flung into a pit, where they were buried alive. She next asked that the Drevlianians send their leading men to provide an escort, then offered them a bath, locked them in the bathhouse and set it afire. Thus avenged, Olga became the first Slav ruler to convert to Christianity, and the Orthodox Church allied itself to the ruling family by making her its first Russian saint.
Kievan Russia prospered for about three centuries, dominating the main trade route from Scandinavia to Constantinople. Then there suddenly sounded new hoofbeats from the East.
The Mongol Empire forged by Genghis Khan in 1206 was one of the most astonishing creations in history. His cavalry pierced the Great Wall of China and overwhelmed the Chin Empire in what has been described as the conquest of 100 million people by 100,000 soldiers. It was Genghis Khan's grandson Batu who first swept into Russia. When Kiev resisted, Batu besieged the city in 1240, burned it to the ground and massacred all its inhabitants. "When we passed through that land," wrote Archbishop Plano Carpini, a papal legate bound for the new power center in Mongolia, "we found lying in the field countless heads and bones of dead people. This city had been extremely large and very populous, whereas now it has been reduced to nothing."
Batu charged onward to conquer Poland and Hungary, and it was probably only the death in 1242 of Batu's uncle, the Great Khan Ugedey (he was apparently - poisoned by a jealous woman in his entourage), that saved Western Europe from the fate of Kiev. Batu decided to retrench and consolidate his rule over the khanate of the Golden Horde. Spread thin though they were, the Mongols of the Golden Horde ruled Russia for more than two centuries, and it was a harsh rule. Mongol tax collectors beggared the peasantry, and occupied Russia remained completely isolated from what the West came to know as the Renaissance. One unexpected consequence: the devastation of southern Russia stimulated the growth of the north, of the trading center in Novgorod and the nearby town of Moscow.
The future metropolis was still an insignificant place. On the death in 1263 of Alexander Nevsky, who had defended Novgorod from the attacking Swedes and Teutonic Knights, the division of his lands gave the 500-sq.-mi. principality of Moscow to his youngest son Daniel. This son and his successors began buying and occasionally seizing more land, and unlike most Russian princes, they used primogeniture to preserve what they acquired. Ivan I, who became Grand Prince of Moscow in 1328, increased his territory fivefold, and the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church moved his headquarters there.