Ivan III

In a reign of forty-three years as Grand Prince of Moscow, from 1462 to 1505, Ivan III, known as Ivan the Great, absorbed Novgorod, Tver and most of the other independent Russian principalities, threw off the last overlordship of the Tatar khans, rebuilt the Moscow Kremlin and began to style himself tsar and sovereign of all Russia. Historians regard him as the real founder of the unified Russian state, which roughly tripled in size during his rule.

Ivan was born on 22 January 1440 to Maria of Borovsk and her husband Vasily II, Grand Prince of Moscow. His childhood fell in the middle of a long dynastic war between his father and Vasily's cousins, who in 1446 seized and blinded the grand prince. Vasily recovered his throne, and to secure the succession he made Ivan co-ruler while still a boy; the young prince is called grand prince in treaties from around 1448 or 1449 and took part in campaigns in his teens. He was married in 1452, at about twelve, to Maria, daughter of the prince of Tver. When Vasily II died in March 1462, Ivan succeeded without dispute.

The Grand Principality of Moscow he inherited was the strongest of the Russian states but only one of several. Novgorod, Tver, Ryazan, Pskov and Yaroslavl were still separate, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ruled the old lands of Kyiv and much of western Rus, and Moscow still paid tribute to the khans of the Great Horde, successor to the Golden Horde.

The richest prize was the Novgorod Republic, a merchant city with an assembly, the veche, and vast northern lands rich in furs. When a party of its boyars, led by the Boretsky family, sought the protection of Casimir IV of Poland-Lithuania in 1470 and 1471, Ivan presented the war as a defence of Orthodoxy against a Catholic king. His army crushed the Novgorodians on the Shelon river in July 1471, and the city accepted harsher terms. In 1477 he used a dispute over his title as a pretext for a second campaign. In January 1478 Novgorod surrendered unconditionally. The veche was abolished, its bell carried off to Moscow, and over the following decade thousands of leading families were deported and their lands given to servitors from Moscow. In 1494 Ivan closed the Hanseatic trading office in the city.

Other principalities fell by pressure, purchase or inheritance: Yaroslavl in 1463, Rostov in 1474 and Vyatka in 1489. Tver, Moscow's old rival, was taken in 1485. Ivan also refused to share new lands with his brothers, as custom expected, and when two of them rebelled he outmanoeuvred them; Andrei the Elder died in prison in 1493.

In 1476 Ivan stopped paying tribute to Ahmed Khan of the Great Horde. In 1480 Ahmed advanced towards Moscow, expecting help from Lithuania that never came. Through the autumn the two armies faced each other across the Ugra river, a tributary of the Oka, without a full battle. As winter approached Ahmed withdrew on 11 November, and he was killed the following year by rival Tatars. Russian tradition treats this "Great Stand on the Ugra" as the end of the Tatar yoke that had begun with the Mongol conquest in the 1230s and 1240s. In practice Moscow's subordination had been weakening for decades, but after 1480 no khan claimed the right to confirm Moscow's rulers.

Ivan exploited divisions among the Tatar successor states. He allied with Mengli Giray of the Crimean Khanate against both the Great Horde and Lithuania, and in 1487 his forces captured Kazan and placed a client khan on its throne.

Ivan claimed all the lands of Kievan Rus' as his inheritance, which set him against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose population was largely Orthodox and East Slavic. Border princes changed sides, and after the death of Casimir IV in 1492 Ivan fought two wars against his son Alexander. The second, in which Moscow's army won a major victory on the Vedrosha river in 1500, brought him Chernihiv, Briansk and a wide band of territory in the west by the truce of 1503. Ivan had married his daughter Helena to Alexander in 1495, but the marriage did not bring peace. In the north-west he built the fortress of Ivangorod facing Livonian Narva and fought an inconclusive war with Sweden.

Widowed in 1467, Ivan took as his second wife, in 1472, Sophia (Zoe) Palaiologina, whose uncle Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor, had died at the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The marriage was promoted by the papacy, which hoped to draw Moscow into union with Rome and a crusade against the Ottomans; neither happened. For Ivan it brought prestige. His court adopted more elaborate ceremony, the double-headed eagle of the Byzantine Empire appeared on his seal alongside Saint George, and from the 1480s he used the title tsar, from Caesar, in some foreign correspondence, together with "sovereign of all Russia". He turned down an offer from the Holy Roman Emperor of a royal crown, insisting that his authority came from God and his ancestors. The notion that Moscow was the "Third Rome", the last seat of true Christianity, was formulated by the monk Philotheus of Pskov in the following reign, but it grew from this period.

Ivan rebuilt the Moscow Kremlin on a grand scale with Italian architects. Aristotele Fioravanti of Bologna built the Cathedral of the Dormition between 1475 and 1479, and other Italians built the Faceted Palace, the Archangel Cathedral, begun in his last years, and the brick walls and towers that still stand. He set up the first cannon foundry in Moscow in 1475.

His government became more personal and autocratic. He reduced the independence of the old princely and boyar families and created a new service class, granting estates called pomestie in exchange for military service. The law code of 1497, the Sudebnik, standardised justice and limited the right of peasants to leave their landlords to a two-week period around St George's Day in late autumn, an early step towards serfdom. Moscow also opened diplomatic relations with Venice, Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire, Denmark and the Ottoman Empire. One of his envoys to Hungary, Fyodor Kuritsyn, is thought to be the author of a Russian tale about Vlad the Impaler.

Ivan's last years were troubled by a struggle over the succession between his grandson Dmitry, son of his late eldest son, and Vasily, his son by Sophia. Ivan had Dmitry crowned as heir in 1498, then reversed himself in 1502, imprisoning Dmitry and his mother and naming Vasily. On his death on 27 October 1505 the throne passed to Vasily III, whose son was Ivan the Terrible.

Russian historians call Ivan the "gatherer of the Russian lands". He was cautious, calculating and ruthless, preferring diplomacy and pressure to open battle where he could. Historians such as John Fennell credit his success in building a centralised state while noting that it came with less freedom and a growing distance from western Europe. The state he created, with its autocratic ruler, its service nobility and its claim to the whole Rus inheritance, set the pattern for the later Tsardom of Russia and runs through the history of Russia to the present.