Book: The Burden of Power (Tsars of Moscow - 3)

The destinies of people exist in history, and history, given from above by laws, determines the troubles and joys, successes and sorrows of any of us, each temporal and temporary human fate, for which a brief moment of its earthly existence contains the immensity of the universe, with the wonders of distant lands and diamond placers of countless mountain worlds in the ocean of heaven.
Before descending from the mountain of the tower to the firmament of the earth and immersing the mind in the teem of passions of the topical, in the vanity of vanity, in destinies that do not know the highest destiny of their own - for so, close- close, weatherly, from 1328 to 1341 we will look at the now disturbing history of the birth of the earth - we will observe from a height what happened in the world to the beginning of the events described, in order to understand, to what and why were the works and exploits of the now disappeared people and what was the meaning of what the Moscow prince Ivan Kalita did in the outcome of the first half of the harsh and sorrowful fourteenth century.
A bird that flies above the ground, stretching its beak and stubbornly waving its wings, sees forests and fields, sees villages smoking smoke, and for it the secret meaning of human existence is indulgent. Whose horses move down there, along the thin twists of the roads? What rumor do people interpret? From peaceful fires or military fires rise fire and pillars of hot bitter air, dangerous wings spread in the aer? The bird does not know history, and a person who is unable to fly above the earth sometimes sees much more than a bird, for he looks with a spiritual eye and sees the indistinguishable from a height, but intelligible to the mind, sees not only the fire of the living, but also the glow of the spiritual flame, sees the ups and downs of the fire with which the destinies of peoples live and move.
And first of all, looking from the height of earthly existence, let us be amazed and horrified by how the spiritual fire of Byzantium withered and faded by the beginning of the fourteenth century, as it was diminished, almost to the complete disappearance of its own - a light, until recently stretched out over the darkness of those languages and peoples.