Novgorod the Great: Russia's Medieval Emporium and Republic

About half-way from Moscow to Leningrad one comes upon the low Valdai Hills, whose highest point, Mount Kamennik, barely touches the thousand-foot mark. Beyond' them the landscape of northwestern Russia stretches, flat and mostly forested, to Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland. The hills fall away rather sharply to the marshy ground on the far side, where, fifty or sixty miles north-west, lies a roughly triangular-shaped sheet of water, Lake Ilmen, something like 340 square miles in area and fed by rivers which drain the land to its east, south and west. From its northern apex the River Volkhov flows almost due north to Lake Ladoga, some 120 miles away.