ON THE COLD AUTUMN DAY OF NOVEMBER 12, 1472, THE THIRTY-two-year-old Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow married the twenty-three-year-old Sophia, the daughter of the despot of the Greek polity of Morea, Thomas Palaiologos (Palaeologus). It was Ivan’s second marriage and Sophia’s first. The ceremony took place in a wooden church in the Kremlin next to the not yet completed Dormition Cathedral, and later Russian chroniclers could not even agree whether the marriage service was performed by the metropolitan or a regular archpriest. For all its modest appearance, the wedding had major symbolic significance: the ruler of Moscow became a relative and continuator of the Byzantine emperors. Sophia’s uncle, Constantine XI Palaiologos, had died in May 1453 defending Constantinople against the Ottoman assault. The Byzantine Empire died with him, but not the imperial ambitions of Orthodox rulers. By marrying Sophia, Ivan III of Moscow was putting on the mantle of the Byzantine emperors.
It was probably owing to Sophia’s Roman connections that Ivan brought to Moscow a group of Italian architects to build new walls for the Kremlin—the seat of the grand princes that Ivan was now turning into an imperial castle. Marco Ruffo, who arrived in Moscow in 1485, built a number of Kremlin palaces and churches. Together with another Italian architect, Pietro Antonio Solari, he constructed the Palace of Facets, the tsar’s richly decorated banqueting quarters. Solari, who came to Moscow in 1487, supervised the construction of the Kremlin towers, including the Spasskaia (Savior’s) Tower. This iconic symbol of Moscow and Russia still bears an inscription commemorating the Italian architect who built it: the text on the inner gates is in Russian, the one on the outer gates in Latin. The former reads: “In the year 6999 [1491], in July, by God’s grace, this tower was built by order of Ivan Vasilievich, sovereign and autocrat of all Rus’ and grand prince of Vladimir and Moscow and Novgorod and Pskov and Tver and Yugra and Viatka and Perm and Bulgar and others in the thirtieth year of his reign, and it was built by Pietro Antonio Solari of the city of Milan.”
Ivan’s title listed his possessions, both old and new. While his marriage and ambitious construction project pointed to the imperial future, his title of ruler of “all Rus’” and claims to individual lands was rooted in the past—more specifically, the medieval origins of his dynasty and state. Scholars point out the dual origins of the power of the Muscovite prince, who functioned as both khan and basileus (the Byzantine emperor)—at once the secular and religious ruler of the realm. Often overlooked in this focus on dual origins is the continuing importance of the title of grand prince, which would remain central to the identity of Ivan III and his successors right up to the mid-sixteenth century. The title associated the princes of Moscow with the long-deceased rulers of Kyivan Rus’, allowing the princes to claim supremacy over the Rus’ lands—the former Kyivan possessions extending from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north.
IVAN’S RIGHT TO RULE SUCH TOWNS AS VLADIMIR AND MOSCOW, as well as Novgorod and Pskov, was based on his claim of descent from the Scandinavian Rurikid dynasty, whose origins went back to the legendary figure of the Viking king (konung) Rurik.
The Rurikids had ruled Kyivan Rus’ as a strong state whose power had reached its peak between the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Among the most venerated princes of Kyiv was Volodymyr (Vladimir), who had ruled the realm from 980 to 1015 and brought Byzantine Christianity to the Rus’ lands, an accomplishment for which the Orthodox Church made him a saint. Another major figure was Volodymyr’s son, Yaroslav the Wise (1019–1054), the builder of St. Sophia’s Cathedral in central Kyiv. According to established tradition, he issued the first Rus’ law code and promoted chronicle writing. Finally, there was another Volodymyr, known as Monomakh because of his family connection to the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, who managed to restore the shaken unity of the Kyivan realm in the course of his twelve-year reign (1113–1125).
Rurikid rule over Kyivan Rus’ came to an abrupt end in the mid-thirteenth century, when the Mongols, accompanied by Turkic steppe tribes known in Rus’ as Tatars, attacked and subjugated the Rus’ principalities. In the fall of 1237, Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan and founder of the easternmost realm of the Mongol Empire, sent envoys to Prince Yurii of Vladimir in northeastern Rus’ to demand his surrender. The prince refused. Within the next few months, the Mongols besieged and devastated Riazan and a number of other Rus’ towns. The prince himself died in battle in March 1238. In the winter of 1239, the Mongols sacked the towns of Chernihiv and Pereiaslav. The next year they appeared on the approaches to Kyiv, the center of a once huge polity. Because Kyiv would not surrender, the Mongols besieged it, using heavy beams to breach the city walls.
“Batu placed battering rams near the city by the Polish Gate,” wrote the chronicler, referring to a location that is now in downtown Kyiv, “for a dense forest came up to there. Beating the walls unceasingly, day and night, he breached them.” In early December, the Mongols rushed across a frozen creek that no longer presented a barrier and poured into the city. As the short winter day drew to a close, the Mongols took over the city walls and palisades, where they stayed overnight, waiting for dawn. That was probably the most dreadful night in the lives of the city’s defenders. Historians believe that the Rus’ warriors and the remaining inhabitants retreated to the Church of the Dormition. The first stone church in Kyiv, it became the last sanctuary for those who would not capitulate. “Meanwhile, people ran to the church and onto its roof with their possessions,” wrote the chronicler about the events of December 7, 1240, the last day of Kyiv’s defense, “[and] the walls of the church collapsed from the weight, and so the fortress was taken by the [Tatar] warriors.”
Few of the inhabitants and defenders of Kyiv survived its fall. Batu and his armies moved westward, conquering the rest of the Rus’ lands and invading Poland and Hungary. The Mongols succeeded in part because the Rus’ lands, once united around Kyiv, no longer formed a coherent polity and were ruled by princes competing with one another for power and influence. At the time of the Mongol invasion, most of the northeastern Rus’ princes, who ruled the lands of today’s central Russia, recognized the suzerainty of the princes of Vladimir. Southwestern Rus’, including the city of Kyiv, was ruled by the Galician-Volhynian princes, while the Republic of Novgorod in northeastern Rus’ conducted its affairs quite independently of the other Rus’ lands. If anything, the Mongol invasion worsened the political fragmentation of the Kyivan Rus’ realm. Mongol rule over what are now the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands was largely indirect, lasting only a few decades. Those lands eventually found themselves under the control of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. Farther north and east, the situation was different. The Mongols established strict control over northeastern Rus’, which in time would become a predominantly Russian land.
Although the unity of Rus’ was very much a thing of the past, by the time of the Mongol invasion the princes throughout the Rus’ lands, from Kyiv and Pereiaslav in the south to Novgorod and Vladimir in the north and east, shared a sense of dynastic origin. They were also heirs to Kyiv’s impressive legacy in the realms of law, religion, literary language, and common Rus’ identity. Nowhere did dynastic continuity with Kyivan Rus’ play a more important role than in Muscovy, the polity that emerged in the northeastern realm of the former Kyivan Rus’ under the suzerainty of the Mongols. To rule over their Rus’ possessions, including Novgorod, the Mongols relied on subordinates holding the title of grand prince of Vladimir. A number of princely families competed with one another for the coveted title, which brought prestige, power, and income to those able to convince the khans of their loyalty and ability to do the job. The Mongol (later Kipchak) khans passed the title from one Rus’ prince to another as a carrot to encourage the princes, who were obliged to collect tribute for the khans from their Rus’ subjects.
The khans played off one princely line against another, trying to avoid the emergence of a strong political center, but eventually proved unable to sustain that strategy. In the course of the fourteenth century, the city of Moscow emerged as an important new center of power in the lands of Mongol Rus’. A small principality at the time of the Mongol invasion of northeastern Rus’ in 1238, Moscow did not have even a princely family of its own. It acquired one only under the Mongols. The princes of Moscow belonged to a junior line of the Rurikids, but thanks to the location of their principality at the crossroads of various trade routes and to their political skills, they became the most powerful princely house in northeastern Rus’. In 1317, the prince of Moscow married a sister of the khan of the Golden Horde, thereby gaining the title of grand prince of Vladimir and the power inherent in the post of the khan’s representative in Rus’.
The Muscovites’ main rivals for the title of grand prince were the princes of Tver, a much more powerful principality than Moscow located between Muscovy and the Republic of Novgorod. But the junior princes of Moscow, whose capital was closer to Vladimir, the original seat of the grand princes, and to the Mongol-controlled steppe, effectively outmaneuvered their competitors. A significant factor in the unexpected and steady rise of Moscow was the policy of the metropolitan of all Rus’, the head of the Orthodox Church, who had moved from Kyiv to Vladimir at the turn of the century. He now established himself in Moscow, making it the new capital of his vast metropolitanate, which covered all the lands of Mongol Rus’ and extended into Lithuanian Rus’ as well. The Moscow princes and the Rus’ metropolitans both professed loyalty to the Golden Horde, and their alliance helped turn Moscow into the true capital of northeastern Rus’.
By the mid-fifteenth century, the princes of Moscow, as principal agents of the khans of the Golden Horde in the Rus’ lands, were in a position to threaten their masters’ continuing political dominance. With the Golden Horde weakened by internal rivalries and entering a period of disintegration, the Moscow princes pushed for the sovereignty of the Rus’ realm. The first to do so was Prince Vasilii II, nicknamed the Blind—his enemies had plucked out his eyes in the vain hope of disqualifying him as a ruler. But it was only during the rule of his son, Ivan III, a man of true foresight who assumed the office of grand prince in 1462 and ruled until 1505, that the goal of independence was finally achieved.
Ivan established his control over the entire territory of Mongol Rus’. To secure his independence of the khans and rule the rebellious Rus’ lands, he employed not only the military might of his realm but also powerful legal and historical arguments. Dynasty and patrimony—two concepts that the Muscovite rulers rooted in the Kyivan past—were key ideological foundations of the tsardom. The visions of the Rus’ princely past and of an imperial future would prove mutually reinforcing in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which were crucial to the formation of Muscovite statehood and identity.
IN 1471, ONE YEAR BEFORE HIS MARRIAGE TO SOPHIA PALAIOLOGINA, Ivan III had scored a major victory in the struggle to consolidate his power over the former Mongol Rus’. His troops had captured and subjugated the Republic of Novgorod, by far the largest and richest polity of the realm.
Many scholars have regarded the Novgorod republic as a democratic alternative to the authoritarian trend in Russian history embodied in the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which was ruled by strong princes. Since the twelfth century, Novgorod, with possessions extending from the Baltic Sea in the west to the White and Barents Seas in the north and the Ural Mountains in the east, had been ruled by officials elected by a popular assembly. The princes of Novgorod functioned as military commanders who served at the pleasure of the citizens, or, rather, their patrician elite. The republic’s wealth came not only from landholdings but also from trade, as Novgorod was a major commercial power in the Baltic region, exporting furs and other forest products and importing textiles for itself and much of Rus’.
In 1470, a group of Novgorod patricians led by Marfa Boretskaia, the widow of a former mayor of the city and mother of its serving mayor, came to an agreement with Casimir IV, who was both grand duke of Lithuania and king of Poland (the two states had concluded a personal and then a dynastic union in 1385). Casimir sent Prince Mykhailo Olelkovych, a son and brother of the princes of Kyiv, to help Novgorod defend itself. But little more help came from the duke, and Mykhailo Olelkovych left the city in the following year. A Muscovite army, supported by Tatar cavalry in the service of Ivan III, attacked the Novgorodians in the summer of 1471. The inhabitants learned of the approaching danger when they saw their soldiers retreating from the field to the city walls with their noses and lips cut off. As the forces of Ivan III advanced, they mutilated their captives and sent them home to terrify the rest of the defending army and the local population.
The decisive battle, which took place on the Shelon River in July 1471, brought victory to the less numerous but more disciplined and experienced Muscovite forces. The Tatars played an important role, ambushing the Novgorodian army and helping to pursue, capture, and kill retreating troops. Muscovite and Novgorodian chroniclers disagreed on the details of the battle, but its outcome and significance were clear: Ivan III had crushed Novgorod’s efforts to maintain its autonomy. Mayor Dmitrii Boretsky was captured in battle and executed on Ivan’s orders. An estimated 12,000 Novgorodians died in battle or were killed in the course of the retreat. The Novgorodians were forced to pay a huge tribute, more than twice the amount that Muscovy had rendered to the Horde, and abandon their alliance with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The republic was on its knees.
The strength of Ivan’s army allowed him to subjugate Novgorod and repel the Great Horde, the main successor to the Golden Horde. But the new status of the Grand Principality of Moscow and its constant acquisition of new territories required justification in the eyes of its subjects and neighbors. According to the Muscovite scribes, who conveniently produced a new rendition of the Russian chronicles in 1472, Ivan III had taken Novgorod and punished the republic for its insubordination on the basis of his patrimonial rights, which went back to Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv. “From antiquity you, the people of Novgorod, have been my patrimony,” the Muscovite envoys allegedly said on behalf of Ivan III, “from our grandfathers and our ancestors, from Grand Prince Volodymyr, the great-grandson of Rurik, the first grand prince in our land, who baptized the Rus’ land. And from that Rurik until this day, you have recognized only one ruling clan of those grand princes.… [W]e, their kin, have ruled over you, and we bestow [our mercy] upon you, and we protect you against [all adversaries], and we are free to punish you if you do not recognize us according to the old tradition.”
The reference to “old tradition” was a fairly new feature of Muscovite political culture. The Kyivan lineage of the Muscovite princely line had hardly been mentioned by chroniclers before Ivan III took Novgorod. Until then, the princes of Moscow had competed for power with those of Tver and other centers by appealing to the khans of the Horde. References to Kyiv and the Rurikid origins of the ruling dynasty had no value in the eyes of the khans, who were the heirs of Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire. But that situation changed with the continuing disintegration of the Horde. The same year Ivan consolidated his rule over Novgorod, he also turned back the Tatar armies of Ahmed, the khan of the Great Horde. Disturbed by the growing power of Moscow, Ahmed had moved his army toward the Muscovite borders, but the Muscovites had mounted an effective defense, preventing Ahmed’s troops from crossing the Oka River. The Tatars turned back, and the Muscovites stopped paying tribute, letting their former overlords know that their dependence on the Horde was over. With Novgorod defeated and Tatar dominance thrown off, the foundations of Muscovite sovereignty had been laid.
But that was not the end of Ivan’s troubles either with Novgorod or with the Mongols. Five years later, the scenario first played out in 1471–1472 was repeated. Once again, the three main actors were Muscovy, Novgorod, and the Horde. In October 1477, as the Novgorodians questioned the conditions of the new treaty imposed on them by Ivan III and his status as their sovereign, the grand prince besieged the city and forced a new loyalty oath on its citizens. In January 1478, Ivan III entered the city. Novgorod ceased to be a republic. The bell that had summoned citizens to council meetings—the symbol of Novgorodian democracy—was taken to Moscow. Marfa Boretskaia, the leader of republican resistance, was brought first to Moscow and then to Nizhnii Novgorod, where she was compelled to take monastic vows. The landed wealth of the metropolitan of Novgorod, of the monasteries, and of the city’s elite was confiscated. The leaders of the resistance and their families were exiled in midwinter, and many did not survive the ordeal. Their lands were given to servitors of the Muscovite prince.
The conquest of Novgorod by Ivan III in 1478 was followed once again by a military confrontation with the Great Horde, which demanded tribute from its former Moscow subjects. This time, Khan Ahmed found an ally in Casimir IV, the king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, who was concerned by the fall of Novgorod and Muscovy’s increasing power in the Lithuanian borderland. The Lithuanian army was supposed to join the Tatars in an attack on Moscow. In the fall of 1480, Ahmed showed up on the Ugra River on the borders of Muscovy, ready for battle, but the Lithuanians, who had allowed the Tatars to march through their territories, did not appear. They were prevented from doing so by an attack on their southern, largely Ukrainian lands by another heir to the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate. Without Lithuanian support, Ahmed would not risk crossing the Ugra and turned back. This retreat became known in Russian history as the final act in the long struggle to shake off the “Tatar yoke” and the first decisive assertion of Muscovite sovereignty. Muscovy, which got to keep Novgorod, began its history as a fully independent state by crushing a democratic rival that had sought to distance itself from the heirs of the Golden Horde.
BY 1480, IVAN HAD SUCCESSFULLY ESTABLISHED HIS SOVEREIGNTY over the lands of Mongol Rus’, but his title, “sovereign and autocrat of all Rus’,” inscribed by Italian architects on the gates of the Kremlin tower a decade later, suggested much more than that. In 1478, the year of the final subordination of Novgorod, Muscovite diplomats began to speak of Moscow’s rights to some Lithuanian territories, including Polatsk and Smolensk. By 1490, Ivan’s chancellery had begun to use the Kyivan descent of the Muscovite princes as grounds to extend his claim from those two principalities to Kyiv itself. In a letter to the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I, Ivan III spoke of undertaking, with God’s grace, to “reconquer our patrimony, the Grand Duchy of Kyiv, which is ruled by Casimir, the Polish king, and his children.” In 1494, the Lithuanian duke was compelled to recognize the new title of the Muscovite ruler, including its reference to “all Rus’.” In 1503–1504, Muscovite envoys made their claims to the Kyivan patrimony known to their Lithuanian counterparts: “The towns and lands now in our possession are not all of our patrimony, [which extends to] the whole Rus’ land, Kyiv and Smolensk and other towns.… [B]y God’s grace, this is our patrimony from antiquity, from our forefathers.”
The extension of Muscovite patrimonial claims to the Rus’ lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the direct outcome of a series of successful Muscovite wars against Lithuania in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They began with border skirmishes in the 1480s. The first actual war was waged in 1492–1494, to be followed by the wars of 1500–1503, 1507–1508, 1512–1522, and 1534–1537—altogether almost half a century of warfare. For most of that period, the Muscovites were on the offensive, their advance checked for the first time in the early sixteenth century. By that time, the Grand Principality of Moscow had extended its borders deep into the territory of the Grand Duchy, capturing Chernihiv and Smolensk. As in the case of Novgorod, many inhabitants of Smolensk were forcibly resettled to the east and replaced by subjects of the Muscovite prince.
The Muscovites were gaining the upper hand thanks to the strength of Ivan III’s armies and the unwillingness of Ivan’s rival, Casimir IV of Poland and Lithuania, to attract and accommodate the descendants of the princes of Kyiv in the lands that now constitute Ukraine and Belarus. As Ivan annexed one principality after another, using his family’s Kyivan descent to legitimize the process, Casimir abolished the only principality still extant in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—that of Kyiv. He did so in 1470, and his decision would bear directly on Lithuania’s “loss” of Novgorod to Muscovy one year later. The Kyiv principality had been ruled by the Olelkovych family, which traced its origins to one of the first Lithuanian rulers, Algirdas, and whose dynastic status was close to, if not on a par with, that of the grand dukes of Lithuania. Prince Mykhailo Olelkovych, who came to Novgorod in 1470 to help defend the republic against Muscovy, was a member of the Kyivan branch of the family. His departure from Novgorod in 1471 was motivated in part by his hope of assuming his father’s office in Kyiv. But he was in for a surprise. Not only did Casimir not allow him to become the next prince of Kyiv, but he abolished the office and the principality altogether, appointing his own representative to administer the region.
The Kyivan princes never forgave Casimir for doing away with their principality and putting an end to their dreams. In 1480, news reached Casimir that Mykhailo Olelkovych, the unsuccessful defender of Novgorod and candidate for the Kyiv principality, had entered into a conspiracy with other princes to kill him and take his place as grand duke. The conspirators were either arrested or fled to Muscovy, but the plot, together with a Crimean Tatar attack on the Grand Duchy, prevented Casimir from sending his army to help Khan Ahmed as he faced the Muscovite forces on the Ugra River. Casimir’s earlier failure to support Novgorod for fear of strengthening the Rus’ princes of the Grand Duchy was now compounded by his inability to help the Great Horde against Muscovy because of the revolt of the very same princes.
The death of Casimir in 1492 and the interregnum that followed it gave Moscow a perfect opportunity to advance Ivan III’s claims to “all Rus’” and launch a full-blown war against the Grand Duchy. The borderland princes were left to their own devices, as Lithuanian troops were either unavailable or insufficiently strong to protect the vassals of the grand duke. Under these circumstances, the princes considered themselves no longer bound by loyalty to the Grand Duchy. “Your father, Sire, kissed the cross in my presence to affirm that it was the duty of your father, our lord, to stand up for our patrimony and defend it against all; but Your Grace, Sire, did not show favor to me… and did not stand up for my patrimony,” wrote one of the “turncoats,” Prince Semen Vorotynsky, to the new grand duke of Lithuania, Alexander. The new grand duke used both force and diplomacy in his efforts to stop the Muscovite advance. He succeeded only to a degree, as he found himself obliged to recognize Ivan’s new title, which included a reference to “all Rus’,” and lost significant territories, including the Chernihiv land near Kyiv.
Alexander’s rule inaugurated an era in which the Lithuanian princes and Polish kings began to take the Muscovite eastern offensives more seriously than Casimir had done. Alexander had to abandon the centralizing reforms of Casimir IV and make an alliance with the princely clans of the Grand Duchy. He recognized the authority of the princely council and promised to consult with its members on all state appointments. He also established close relations with the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) princes. In 1514, the Muscovite troops were defeated in the Battle of Orsha by a Lithuanian-Ruthenian army led by one of those princes. The almost uninterrupted Muscovite westward march was finally checked. The war established, for the time being, the extent of the borders of “all Rus’” in the titles of the Moscow grand princes: those borders included Smolensk and Chernihiv but not Kyiv or Polatsk (in present-day Ukraine and Belarus, respectively), which remained within the borders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Internal strife in Moscow following the death of Ivan III in 1505, and, in particular, of his son Vasilii III in 1533, halted the Muscovite westward advance, but the aspiration to extend the Muscovite “patrimony” at the expense of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was by no means abandoned.
The Muscovite wars with Lithuania, triggered by the conflict over the fate of Novgorod and continued under the banner of gathering the patrimony of the Kyivan princes, made Muscovy a major actor on the East European scene. It was no longer just a country fighting for its independence, but one expanding beyond its “natural” Mongol borders.
IN THE 1520S, MUSCOVITE INTELLECTUALS PRODUCED A NEW genealogical tract, the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, which associated the rulers in the Kremlin, the former grand princes of Vladimir, with Emperor Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire. The link was established though a legendary personality called Prus, allegedly the brother of Augustus. Thus the founder of the Roman Empire and the rulers of Moscow had the same forefather. But how were the grand princes of Vladimir (and later, Moscow) related to Prus? The solution proposed by the Muscovite authors was quite simple: the missing link was another legendary figure, Prince Rurik, the founder of the Kyivan ruling clan. According to the Rus’ chronicles, Rurik had come from the north, the part of the world allegedly assigned by Augustus to Prus.
Should that lineage be found wanting, the authors provided another connection to Rome with a much more solid historical foundation. It led to the eternal city through Byzantium. The princes of Vladimir and Moscow were heirs of Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) Monomakh, the twelfth-century ruler of Kyiv who had received his name from his mother, a relative of the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, who in turn was related to Augustus. One way or another, all roads of the Muscovite imagination led to Rome. According to the Tale, Constantine had passed on his emperor’s regalia to Volodymyr, and they had subsequently been inherited by the princes of Moscow. Among them was Monomakh’s Cap, an Eastern equivalent of an emperor’s crown. It was in fact a fourteenth-century gold filigree skullcap from Central Asia, possibly a gift from the khan of the Golden Horde, intended to symbolize the vassal status of the Muscovite princes. The Mongol gift was now reimagined as a symbol of imperial power.
The Monomakh Cap and the Augustus–Prus–Monomakh account of the origins of the Moscow rulers’ sovereign and imperial power would have a spectacular career in Muscovite political thought. Both were included in the coronation of Ivan IV (the Terrible), the first Muscovite ruler to be installed with the title of tsar—a Slavic word derived from the Latin “Caesar,” meaning emperor, or ruler of rulers. The ceremony took place in 1547, with Monomakh’s Cap serving as Ivan’s crown. Metropolitan Makarii, who devised the formalities, conferred divine power on the new ruler, stressing the Kyivan and ultimately Roman origins of the dynasty. In the next few decades, the Augustus legend would become central to the official genealogy of the Muscovite rulers as presented in the Book of Royal Degrees, the first official history of Muscovy. It was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1560 and written at the metropolitan’s court. The legend also made its way into the frescoes of Moscow palaces and cathedrals. Sigismund Herberstein, a Habsburg envoy who first visited Muscovy in 1519 and published an account of his voyages in 1549, during the rule of Ivan the Terrible, claimed that the Muscovites he met believed in the Roman origins of Rurik, as well as those of their current ruler.
The Roman connection served Ivan well both at home, by distinguishing the ruling dynasty from the rest of the princely elite, and abroad, by putting him on a par with Western rulers. Ivan’s geopolitical objectives were significantly different from those of his father and grandfather. Unlike them, he switched the focus of his foreign policy from gathering the Rus’ lands to taking over those of the Horde. In 1552, he defeated and annexed the Khanate of Kazan. The city’s inhabitants were resettled and replaced by subjects of the tsar—the policy applied earlier in Novgorod and Smolensk. In 1556, Ivan’s troops defeated another successor to the Horde, the Khanate of Astrakhan, and Muscovy took control of the all-important Volga trade route. In ideological terms, the tsar of Muscovy had defeated two Tatar rulers to whom the Muscovite chronicles referred consistently as “tsars.” Ivan’s authority was enhanced when he added their tsardoms to his. In his diplomatic correspondence, he would count separately the years of his rule over the Muscovite, Kazan, and Astrakhan tsardoms.
If Ivan’s alleged descent from Augustus made him an equal of the Habsburgs in lineage, the conquest of the Volga khanates improved his geopolitical standing and gave substance to his claim to be an emperor. In 1557, the year after the conquest of Astrakhan, Ivan wrote to the supreme Orthodox authority, the patriarch of Constantinople, asking for recognition as tsar on the basis of his conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan. The same argument was used in dealings with Muscovy’s Western counterparts. But reaction to Ivan’s claim to the title of tsar, or Caesar, was mixed. The patriarch of Constantinople, eager to recognize a new Orthodox emperor and potential protector, assured Ivan in 1558 that “the tsar’s name is invoked in the Universal Church every Sunday, like the names of the former Byzantine tsars [emperors].” The rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were more cautious, as the Muscovite ruler’s new title undermined the universality of their authority. Thus the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian II suggested in 1576 that Ivan call himself eastern emperor—a possible reference to Byzantine tradition—or emperor of all Rus’, a variation on the grand-princely title of Ivan and his predecessors.
In 1558, with his tsar’s title recognized by the patriarch of Constantinople but not by Western rulers, Ivan turned his troops westward. The Livonian War, which would last a quarter of a century, until 1583, started with an attack on a declining regional power, the Livonian Order, a state established by Teutonic knights that encompassed parts of Estonian, Latvian, and, to a lesser extent, Lithuanian territories. The campaign began well, with victory for Ivan’s troops, but the defeat and destruction of the order alerted its neighbors to the rising Muscovite threat. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had borne the brunt of Muscovite offensives since the late fifteenth century, leaped into battle on the side of the order only to be badly defeated. In 1563, Ivan the Terrible took Polatsk, a city and territory in present-day Belarus first claimed by the Muscovites back in 1478, immediately after their takeover of Novgorod. In 1569, in the Polish city of Lublin, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was forced to turn its previous dynastic union with the Kingdom of Poland into a permanent union of the two states, losing its independence and control over Ukrainian lands to Poland but maintaining its rule over Belarus. The combined Polish-Lithuanian troops were now able to withstand the Muscovite offensive, with additional assistance from Sweden.
The tsar of Muscovy found himself on the defensive. In 1571, taking advantage of his involvement in the west, the Crimean Tatars captured Moscow, forcing Ivan to end his ill-fated rule by terror known as the oprichnina, whereby he had divided his realm, cleansing part of it of aristocratic clans. But the war in the west continued to go badly. The new Polish king, Stephen Báthory, recaptured Polatsk at the head of Polish and Lithuanian armies in 1579. Two years later, the Swedes expelled Muscovite troops from Narva, an important trade center on the Baltic Sea controlled by Muscovy since 1558. In 1582, Ivan found himself obliged to make a peace treaty that ended his ambitions to acquire yet another “tsardom” on the Baltic. The tsar, regarded by some of his subjects as the protector of Orthodoxy throughout the world, was reduced to asking the pope to help negotiate peace with the Polish king. It was a most humiliating way of invoking Ivan’s alleged Roman origins.
Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, one year after a peace with Sweden ended the Livonian War. He left his son and successor, Fedor Ivanovich, who would be the last Rurikid on the Muscovite throne, a country economically broken and devastated by war and terror but more centralized than under any previous Muscovite ruler. He also left Fedor the title of tsar, which was now recognized by foreign leaders, and Monomakh’s Cap as the crown of the Tsardom of Muscovy. The cap and the legend attached to it embodied the complex identity of the tsardom and its elites as it had evolved in the course of the sixteenth century. Featuring Central Asian gold and jewels and Muscovite furs, the cap was swathed in invisible layers of historical mythology, first Kyivan, then Byzantine, and finally Roman. Whether the Muscovites sought a Roman connection by way of the Baltics and Prussia or the Black Sea and Constantinople, all ways led through Kyiv, the seat of the first Rurikid princes, without whom there could be no claim to anything but the Mongol tradition.
It was the Kyivan myth of origins that became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire. The ruling dynasty, which relied on Kyivan roots to legitimize its rule, would subsequently find it difficult, if not impossible, to divorce itself from that founding myth.