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RATHER THAN STRIVING for an imperial role, Muscovy stumbled into one. The impetus came from the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. This long-expected but none the less traumatic event was immediately interpreted by the Russian bishops as a punishment for apostasy -Constantinople’s dalliance with the Pope at the Council of Ferrara/ Florence. The work of legitimizing Russian imperial power began at that point, and again churchmen took the lead. The Legend of the White Cowl, suggesting that Moscow had become the seat of true Orthodoxy in religion, and the idea of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, the new capital of the Roman Empire, were both elaborated in monastic think-tanks. However, there was also a more tangible kind of transfer from Constantinople to Moscow: both before and after 1453, Greek refugees trickled in. They included churchmen, noblemen, artists and functionaries of every sort, and they brought with them the diplomatic, administrative and military expertise essential to the building of empires.

Moscow’s rulers began to hanker after imperial dignity, both to boost their authority in their own domains and to enhance their standing abroad. They did not aspire to rule the world, however. Nor is there evidence that they contemplated ruling a multiplicity of different peoples as the Romans had done. Muscovy could double its territorial extent and power merely by extending its rule over linguistic Russians who were Orthodox Christians, through ‘the ingathering of the Russian lands’ as it came to be called. But the first priority was to complete the task that Vasilii the Blind had begun: to establish direct control over the subject princes and exploit their lands and people in a systematic way

From this point of view the reign of Vasilii’s twenty-two-year-old son, Ivan III, did not begin auspiciously. Within a year of his accession in 1462, Novgorod had applied to King Casimir of Poland-Lithuania for support against him, and the Knights of the Sword had invaded the Principality of Pskov from Livonia. Yet eventually he was to succeed on almost every front. He was to become the great centralizer of the Russian principalities, and an historical figure of comparable weight to his contemporaries Henry VII of England and Louis XI of France.

He resolved the ambiguous status of the more important apanage principalities. Their lords ruled on their own account, and although he was grand Prince - their acknowledged superior - in practice they could defy him. He might call on them to join him with all their force to repel an invader or to attack an enemy’s stronghold, and they might very well comply, like those princes who had joined Dmitrii of the Don in his famous battle against the Tatars years before. But again they might not. Their assessments of necessity and advantage were not necessarily the same as his, and, even though they had a formal and moral obligation to the Grand Prince, they had the power to act as they pleased. And as long as they retained that power, Muscovy would be vulnerable to foreign enemies. Furthermore, the perpetuation of a subordinate prince’s command over his own forces allowed the possibility of civil war. As the reign of Vasilii II had proved, a grand prince was ill-advised to trust even his nearest kith and kin. And so Ivan III determined to be ‘sovereign over all the sovereigns of the Russian land’. His aim was to subordinate the princes to his will, absorb their private armies into his own army, and transfer such of their boyars as might be useful — and unconditionally loyal — into his own service. In short, he wanted to monopolize, and rationalize, power over the Russian lands. He also set out to solve the perennial succession question, to make possession of the throne hereditary, the permanent property (votchina) of himself and his descendants, requiring oaths not only to himself but to his chosen heir. ¹

In terms of Muscovy’s territorial expansion the results were dramatic. In the 1470s Muscovy secured all Novgorod’s northern territories as far as the east and west banks of the White Sea, and the lands of Great Perm eastward to the river Ob, which bordered on the frontier with the Khanate of Siberia. This brought more native peoples under Ivan’s rule: Voguls and Ostiaks, Votiaks and Cheremis. The city state of Tver, which had hitherto blocked Moscow’s way to the north, had been incorporated; Novgorod was crushed, and its constitution, which incorporated liberties for the propertied element, was overridden. Ivan had already annexed Iaroslavl (1463) and Viatka to the south. He stood firm against the Golden Horde’s last attempt to bully Muscovy in 1480, and in 1493 he adopted the title ‘Sovereign of All Russia’.