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In 1514 Vasilii captured the important city of Smolensk to the west. Only a few years before, he had abolished Pskov’s former liberties. It was by then safe for him to do so. He had made peace with both Lithuania and Livonia in 1509. Until that point he could not afford to antagonize Pskov, which was so important for mobilizing troops on the western frontier, by threatening what remained of its autonomy. But once he no longer needed to placate it, its offending institutions were eliminated. ³⁷ Having strengthened Muscovy’s position in the west, he then turned to the south. In 1523 he tried and failed to take the Tatar city of Kazan, but then found an inventive way of bypassing it and achieving a large part of his purpose by building a fort near by. He called it Vasilievskaia, after himself. The project was expensive, but soon repaid the investment, for not only did Vasilievskaia threaten Kazan, it sheltered a fair which succeeding in stealing most of the trade of the nomadic Nogai Tatars, which had formerly gone to Kazan. ³⁸Meanwhile he cultivated relations with Europe’s great powers, especially the Emperor. In 1514 Vasily’s diplomats scored a triumph: their master was actually referred to as ‘Keyser’ in the German version of an agreement, and ‘imperator’ in the Latin: Vasilii had achieved recognition as a ruler of equal rank to the Emperor Maximilian. ³⁹

This triumph was also somewhat ironic, because (as has been noted before) though Muscovy had an emperor it was not yet an empire. Apart from tribesmen incapable of making a state of their own, Vasilii ruled over virtually none but Russians. In any case Maximilian soon came to a rap-prochement with Poland and his officials reverted to their former manner of addressing the Grand Prince. Nevertheless the idea had been aired. The Emperors embassy to Moscow of 1517 - led by Sigismund von Herberstein, a Slovene nobleman who was to write one of the earliest published accounts of Russia - did not refer to an imperial title. However, Vasilii had allowed a resumption of relations with Constantinople, broken off after the Council of Florence, and the Greeks were always ready to point to a continuity between their imperial heritage and that of Vasilii, whose mother, after all, had been a Palaeologue.

In 1518 Vasilii received a large delegation from the patriarch of Constantinople, which included an interpreter called Maxim, a learned scholar who was to remain in Muscovy. And that same year an emissary, Nicholas Schonberg, arrived from Pope Leo X in the hope of negotiating a five-year truce between Muscovy and Poland, a united front against the Turk, and a union of the Muscovite Church with Rome. And once again the matter of the Constantinople inheritance was raised.

The monk Filofei, otherwise known as Philotheus of Pskov, developed the idea of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ in a letter to Vasilii III around 1523. This germ of an idea was to be developed into the Legend of the White Cowl. The cowl, the headdress worn by a patriarch, symbolizing the purity of faith that, according to the story, had once characterized St Peter, had moved from Rome to Constantinople (the Second Rome), which, as events had proved, was unworthy of the honour. For this reason it had now migrated to the ‘Third Rome’, Moscow. It has been argued that the purpose of the myth was to promote Moscow as the chief centre of the Orthodox world rather than support its pretensions to empire. ⁴⁰Nevertheless, it was to provide the state with a religious justification for uniting not just the Russians but all Orthodox Christians, whether in Russia, Ukraine, the Balkans or the Levant.

Year after year passed, and still Grand Princess Solomonia did not bear a child. For twenty years her husband, Vasilii, showed patience, but he also took precautions. He forbade his younger brothers from marrying until he had an heir. Eventually, in 1525, he dispatched Solomonia to a nunnery and obtained permission from the Church to remarry. Then, immediately after his second marriage, to Elena Glinskaia, Vasilii did something strangely untraditional. He shaved off his beard. His appearance clean-shaven shocked many Russians, and not surprisingly. They believed that a man was made in God’s image, and that his beard was an integral part of him. A clean-shaven man was a heretic or, worse, a Latin, someone who had betrayed his heritage. Indeed, one of the most intense expressions of hatred by one Russian for another was to try to cut off his beard, for to lose one’s beard was tantamount to losing one’s place in the world to come. ⁴¹ Vasilii’s gesture, however, suggests that he believed he must have the appearance of a Roman emperor if he were to realize his imperial ambitions.