Meanwhile Yaroslaff, brother of the grand prince George II, was his successor in Suzdal.  Yaroslaff, 1238-1246, found his inheritance in the most deplorable condition.  The towns and villages were burned, the country and roads covered with unburied corpses; the survivors hid themselves in the woods.  He recalled the fugitives and began to rebuild.  Batu, who had completed the devastation of South Russia, summoned Yaroslaff to do him homage at Sarai, on the Volga.  Yaroslaff was received there with distinction.  Batu confirmed his title of grand prince, but invited him to go in person to the Great Khan, supreme chief of the Mongol nation, who lived on the banks of the river Sakhalian or Amur.  To do this was to cross the whole of Russia and Asia.  Yaroslaff bent his knees to the new master of the world, Oktai, succeeded in refuting the accusations brought against him by a Russian boyar, and obtained a new confirmation of his title.  On his return he died in the desert of exhaustion, and his faithful servants brought his body back to Vladimir.  His son Andrew succeeded him in Suzdal, 1246-1252.  His other son, Alexander, reigned at Novgorod the Great.

Alexander was as brave as he was intelligent.  He was the hero of the North, and yet he forced himself to accept the necessary humiliations of his terrible situation.  In his youth we see him fighting with all the enemies of Novgorod, Livonian knights and Tchuds, Swedes and Finns.  The Novgorodians found themselves at issue with the Scandinavians on the subject of their possessions on the Neva and the Gulf of Finland.  As they had helped the natives to resist the Latin faith, King John obtained the promise of Gregory IX that a crusade, with plenary indulgences, should be preached against the Great Republic and her proteges, the pagans of the Baltic.  His son-in-law, Birger, with an army of Scandinavians, Finns, and western crusaders, took the command of the forces, and sent word to the Prince of Novgorod:  “Defend yourself if you can; know that I am already in your provinces.”  The Russians on their side, feeling they were fighting for orthodoxy, opposed the Latin crusade with a Greek one.

Alexander humbled himself in St. Sophia, received the benediction of the archbishop Spiridion, and addressed an energetic harangue to his warriors.  He had no time to await reinforcements from Suzdal.  He attacked the Swedish camp, which was situated on the Ijora, one of the southern affluents of the Neva, which has given its name to Ingria.  Alexander won a brilliant victory, which gained him his surname of Nevski, and the honor of becoming, under Peter the Great, the second conqueror of the Swedes, one of the patrons of St. Petersburg.  By the orders of his great successor his bones repose in the monastery of Alexander Nevski.