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the west the Lithuanians—the last of the peoples ofEurope to be christianized—in the same fourteenthcentury acknowledged the Pope. The Russian principalitieswere too shattered by the Mongol invasion andtoo divided among themselves to prevent the expansion ofLithuanian and Polish rule over the western Russian lands,including Kiev itself. The composite grand duchy ofLithuania for long remained largely Russian and Orthodoxin character, but the adoption of Catholicism by theLithuanians greatly increased Polish influence, which wasfurther promoted by the fact that from 1386 the dynastyof the grand duchy and of Poland was the same (seep. 204). Thus Orthodoxy and Russian influence werelosing ground on the west.During the sway of the Golden Horde the church,like the rest of Muscovy, was to a large extent thrownin upon itself, but in its later phase there was a strikingrevival of religious life. Monasticism between 1350 and1500 extended and flourished as never before or since.During the first three and a half centuries of Christianityin Russia we know of the foundation of rather over onehundred monasteries, most of them before 1200, andnearly all of them in the Kiev and Novgorod regions andin or very close to towns. Between 1340 and 1440 weknow of no less than one hundred and fifty newmonasteries in Muscovy, the majority in the forestwilderness, and their numbers continued to increase.The most striking characteristics of the new monasticmovement were these: it was no longer the follower butthe leader of expansion; it sought the untamed wilderness,not as before the princes' courts and the bishops'seats; it recruited itself widely, from different classesand from the young as much as from the old; it wasclosely linked with the peasantry (not always amicably),in part preceding, in part following, the movement ofthe peasantry northwards beyond the Volga; finally, itthrew up a series of remarkable religious leaders, fortifiedin the strength of their exceptional spiritual gifts bymeasured asceticism and practical application of theevangelical virtues.Although many monks were for a time anchorites, and182