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movement of game and fur-bearing animals, the shiftingnature of cultivation encouraged movement, and thelong persistence of extensive methods of raising a livingstamped upon the Russians love of land, but not sostrongly of this or that plot of land.From the rough line Kiev-Smolensk-Novgorod theRussians pushed out far into the wooded steppe,eastwards still in the zone of mixed forests into thelands lying between the Oka and the Volga, and northwardsuntil their canoes were paddling through the solidpine forests beyond lakes Ladoga and Onega. Sinceabout 1000 political conditions, and to some extent theChristian church which had just been imported fromByzantium, added to the tempo of colonization.Between 1000 and the Mongol conquest in thethirteenth century the most vital event in the historyof the Russians, apart from their conversion to Christianity,was their settling of the lands between the Okaand the Volga, later to become the centre of Muscovy.This was achieved at the expense of Finnish tribes inoccupation of them, who were gradually conquered andassimilated or driven farther afield, leaving the mapstill thickly studded with their river and other placenames. It was accompanied also by continued struggleon the east with the Finnish Mordva and with thestrongly organized Moslem Bulgars, centred around thejunction of the Volga and the Kama. The southernadvance into the steppe, as will be shown later, failedto be maintained against the nomad peoples, and theMongol invasion of 1237-40 set the seal on the victoryof the steppe. For the next two centuries the Russians,broadly speaking, were confined to the forest.The settlements tended to be concentrated in moraineregions, on the better-drained slopes, by portages, onlakes or streams that were rich in fish, and on the naturalclearings which, especially in the south-west and againbetween the Oka and the Volga, contained some goodsoils and more favourable conditions for agriculture.This remained, however, always closely bound up withthe forest—wild bees, fur and game, tar and woodworking.Scattered homesteads, with the big undivided23