When the monastic culture spread under the influence of Sergei Radonezsky and his disciples, it resulted in a spiritual settlement of the north. This map of Kievan Rus' shows the regions to which this "monastic colonization" of the 14th–16th century extended.
Kievan Rus', 14th–16th century, map, 2006, author: Captain Blood, Britta Müller-Schauenburg, source: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kievan_Rus_en.jpg?, Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.