For two days they ransacked the whole city: the Podol and the Hill and the monasteries and St Sophia and the Tithe Church of the Mother of God. And there was no mercy from anywhere to anyone as churches burned and Christians were murdered or bound and women were taken into captivity, parted from their husbands by force, and infants wept as they watched their mothers being taken. And they looted a multitude of property, and they stripped the churches of icons and books and vestments and took away the bells . . . And among the people of Kiev there was wailing and grief and unquenchable sorrow and unceasing tears.1