Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE CONQUEST OP SIBERIA The enterprising merchants of Novgorod, in their keen search after furs for the European markets, pushed their expeditions eastwards over the whole of Northern Eussia, and at a very early date reached a mountain chain which seemed very high to men accustomed to the dead level of the Eussian plains. It was called by some the Yugra chain, by others the Stony Girdle, because it was supposed to mark the limits of the world; the modern name is the Tartar equivalent of the latter, as Ural means ' girdle ' in the language of the natives. A little experience soon showed that the chain was not difficult to cross, and the Novgorodians reached the lands beyond, which they called Yugra. It is said that the first knowledge of Yugra reaches back to the eleventh century. Extravagant accounts of the distant land were told by the rare travellers : the inhabitants were said to be speechless, and to live close to cannibal nations, just as the Greeks of Homer peopled with Lestrigones and Cyclopes the land which was to become the Magna Grsecia of their descendants. The Novgorodians never attempted to settle on either side of the Ural, but were content to send parties to collect tribute and barter with the natives. Even this was sufficiently dangerous, and many of these early pioneers were massacred. Far different were the methods employed by the people of Moscow. Their advance was much slower, but morepermanent. In their expansion to the north-east they did not send expeditions to collect tribute or barter, but colonists to build log-huts and cultivate the land. The two currents of emigration were bound to meet, and after about a century the Muscovite settlers intercepted and stopped the trading parties of Novgorod. This happened during the reign of Ivan III...