Ivan III

Ivan III (ruled 1462–1505) consolidated from a secure throne the gains his father, Vasily II, had won. The “gathering of the Russian lands,” as it has traditionally been known, became under Ivan a conscious and irresistible drive by Moscow to annex all East Slavic lands, both the Russian territories, which traditionally had close links with Moscow, and the Belarusian and Ukrainian regions, which had developed under distinctly different historical and cultural circumstances. In 1471 Ivan mounted a simultaneous attack upon Novgorod and its upper Volga colonies, which capitulated and accepted Moscow’s commercial and political demands. The trading republic, however, retained considerable de facto independence and became involved with the Lithuanian princes in an attempt to resist Moscow. Ivan, using these dealings as a pretext, attacked again, and in 1478 Novgorod was absorbed by Moscow. A Muscovite governor was installed, and 70 Novgorodian boyar families were deported and assigned estates elsewhere to hold in service tenure, being replaced by members of the Moscow military-service class.

Tver suffered a similar fate. Ivan had agreed with Prince Michael Borisovich of Tver to conduct foreign relations in concert and by consultation, but, when the Tverite complained that Ivan was not consulting him on important matters, Ivan attacked him and annexed his lands (1485). By the end of Ivan’s reign, there were no Russian princes who dared conduct policies unacceptable to Moscow.

The success of Ivan’s expansion was determined by his skillful dealings with the Polish-Lithuanian state, which had expanded down the Dnieper basin and into Slavic territories on the south flank of Moscow. After 1450 a competition developed for control of the numerous semi-independent principalities of the Dnieper and upper Donets regions. In the early 1490s some minor East Slavic princes defected from Lithuania to Moscow. The first phase of the conflict, confined to border skirmishes, ended in 1494 with a treaty ceding Vyazma to Moscow and with the marriage of Ivan’s daughter Yelena to Alexander, grand duke of Lithuania. In 1500, on the initiative of Lithuanian defectors, Ivan’s armies seized a number of important border towns, thus beginning a war that ended somewhat inconclusively in 1503 with a truce that extended Ivan’s border considerably to the west.

The third major element of Ivan’s foreign policy comprised his relations with the various Tatar confederations. In the 1470s the Crimean khan Mengli Giray came into increasing conflict with Khan Ahmed of the Golden Horde and became interested in an alliance with Moscow against Ahmed and Lithuania. Ivan, eager to dissolve the connection between Lithuania and Crimea but not wanting to alienate Ahmed, stalled for time. In 1481, when Ahmed died, Ivan was able to forge an alliance with the Nogays, Mengli Giray, and Kazan. The security provided by this system became the cornerstone of his later policies.

In addition to problems of war and diplomacy, Ivan was faced with a number of challenges from within his own family and court. In 1472 his eldest brother, Yury, died childless, and Ivan appropriated his entire estate. This action antagonized the two eldest surviving brothers, Andrey and Boris, whose grievances were further increased by Ivan’s refusal to give them a share of conquered Novgorod. In 1480 they rebelled, and only with difficulty were they persuaded to remain loyal. A more serious conflict arose (1497–1502) in the form of an open and murderous struggle among Ivan’s relatives for succession to the throne. Ivan had originally named as his heir his grandson Dmitry, son of his deceased son Ivan and the Moldavian princess Yelena, but a group close to Ivan’s second wife, Sofia (Zoë) Palaeologus, opposed this; her son Vasily threatened and perhaps attempted an insurrection, and Ivan was forced to accept Vasily.

Ivan made the first effort on the part of a Muscovite ruler to become involved in the diplomacy of western Europe. He and his advisers realized the need for a counterpoise to the Polish-Lithuanian power, while the diplomats of Rome and Vienna were interested in the possibility of flanking the growing empire of the Ottomans with a Muscovite-Tatar force. In the 1470s and ’80s there was an unprecedented traffic between these capitals and Moscow. It was through these channels that Ivan arranged his marriage to Sofia Palaeologus, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor. Sofia has been credited with considerable influence over Ivan, in particular with urging him to adopt the Byzantine political style (e.g., autocracy, state domination of the church, etc.), but in fact she probably had little influence over Ivan’s policies. His reign ended on a note of failure, with his overtures to the West and his brief rapprochement with Lithuania both disrupted by the intractable territorial and religious conflicts of the Slavic East and by the opportunism of the local magnates. Moscow’s situation was worsened after Ivan’s death by the collapse of the alliance with the Crimean khan Mengli Giray upon the khan’s death in 1515, opening a new period of chaos and readjustment in the steppe.

A similar appraisal must be made of Ivan’s domestic policies. Although his reign was notable for the annexation of the rich Novgorodian provinces and for the establishment of a regular bureaucracy and a land-tenure system, these achievements created new problems for his successors. The system of land grants to military servitors, maintained for centuries (with changes) in all conquered lands, ultimately suppressed the interest of both landlords and tenants in increasing agricultural productivity.

Vasily III

Ivan’s son Vasily, who came to the throne in 1505, greatly strengthened the monarchy. He completed the annexation of Russian territories with the absorption of Pskov (1510) and Ryazan (1521) and began the advance into non-Russian territories (Smolensk, 1514). Faced with a continuing Lithuanian war and with the breakdown of his father’s Tatar policy, Vasily carefully temporized in order to avoid uniting his enemies. Once he had secured peace in the west, he was able to deal directly with the khan of the Crimean Tatars. In the end, however, much of what Vasily accomplished was undone by his failure as a procreator: divorcing his first wife for her apparent barrenness, he married Yelena Glinskaya, who bore him only two children—the deaf and mute Yury and the sickly Ivan, who was three years old at Vasily’s death in 1533.