The Grand Principality of Moscow

A halfway villa becomes a throne

formationDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

The first mention of Moscow in the chronicles is not flattering. In 1147 the prince of Suzdal, Yuri Dolgoruki, invited a neighbouring prince to what the record calls a mighty dinner at a spot on his southern border - a halfway stop on the road between Suzdal and Kyiv, apparently no more than his own country villa. Nine years later Yuri had a ring of wooden walls built around it. For the rest of the twelfth century and most of the thirteenth, Moscow was not even a settled princely seat: rulers passed through it, none stayed, and for stretches of years it had no prince at all.

The youngest son gets the smallest prize

That changed in 1263. Alexander Nevsky, prince of Novgorod and Vladimir, died that year, and his youngest son Daniel, still a minor, was given Moscow as his own principality - the smallest and least regarded portion of his father's holdings, assigned to the junior line precisely because it was worth the least to anyone senior. From that year on the town had a permanent ruling house of its own, and every Muscovite prince who followed, down to the last, traced his line back to that same overlooked younger son.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · A.Savin · FAL

What made a junior appanage worth having

Moscow's geography, unglamorous as it looked on a map of princely prestige, sat where three overland roads and a river system meshed: routes from Novgorod, from Smolensk, and from Kyiv itself converged there, along with a river connection linking the Upper Volga to the Oka. Colonists moving north from a war-torn south passed through Moscow first and often stopped there, giving the principality an early density of settlement its rivals lacked. None of this made Moscow rich by comparison with Novgorod's trade or Suzdal's older prestige. It made Moscow defensible, well-peopled, and, crucially, positioned to profit from whatever else its princes could add to it.

A dynasty with nowhere higher to fall from

Being junior carried one further advantage nobody could have planned for: Daniel's line had no grand inheritance to lose and no old rivalry to defend, only territory to gain. Every other branch of the same princely house was already committed to older feuds and older claims. Moscow's princes, starting from nothing, spent the following century adding to what they had piece by piece - through purchase, through inheritance, and, before long, through service to the one power that now stood over every Rus' principality alike.

Unblushing robbers

expansionDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

Daniel held Moscow for forty years after receiving it as a boy, and the chronicle's own verdict on how the earliest Muscovite princes actually behaved is blunt: they were, in Kliuchevsky's phrase, "robbers of the most unblushing type." Being junior meant having no old feud to defend and no rung of seniority worth respecting - and Daniel's whole reign shows a prince who understood that better than any of his rivals.

A stratagem against Riazan

Daniel attacked his neighbour Constantine of Riazan without provocation, defeated him "by a certain cunning" rather than open battle, took him prisoner, and annexed Kolomna - the town that put the Moskva river's own mouth under Muscovite control for the first time. He spent the rest of his reign at odds with his own elder brothers, Dmitri and Andrei, each of whom held the senior Vladimir throne in turn: a junior prince fighting his own family for advantage rather than waiting his place in a line of succession that was never going to reach him.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

That same disregard for the old rules paid off in an unplanned windfall. Daniel became close friends with Ivan, Dmitri's own son and ruler of Pereyaslavl - close enough that when Ivan died childless, he willed his entire appanage to Daniel rather than to his own senior kinsmen, who by every customary rule of inheritance had the better claim to it. Moscow absorbed Pereyaslavl without a battle, on the strength of a friendship its prince had cultivated instead of a birthright he never had.

Yuri finishes what his father started

Daniel died in 1303, and his son Yuri wasted no time proving the family trait ran in the blood. That same year he made an unprovoked attack on the neighbouring Prince of Mozhaisk, imprisoned him, and annexed his appanage outright - and then, for good measure, had his own father's old prisoner Constantine of Riazan murdered and Kolomna's annexation made permanent rather than provisional. Between father and son, Moscow's rulers had, within a single generation, secured the entire course of the Moskva river from source to mouth.

What the family actually built

None of this reads as statecraft in the grand sense - it reads as opportunism, seized without apology whenever circumstances allowed it. But it set the pattern every Muscovite prince after Yuri would follow: skilful adaptation to whatever the moment offered, rather than loyalty to tradition or the rota of princely seniority that had governed the Rurikid house since Kyiv. By the time the fourteenth century's raids and disruptions began to settle into something more orderly, Moscow's princes had already stopped needing to be robbers - the territory Daniel and Yuri had taken by stratagem, murder and a friend's bequest was the base every later expansion, including the very different methods Yuri's own brother Ivan Kalita would use, was built on.

Never empty-handed

expansionDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

Every Rus' prince by the fourteenth century owed the Golden Horde tribute and periodic homage at its court. Ivan, Daniel's third successor and known to history by the nickname Kalita - "the money-bag"

• distinguished himself from every rival by never once arriving at that court without a substantial gift for the khan, his favourites, and his officials. It was, by the chronicle's own account, an axiom among the Tartars that a visit from the Muscovite prince meant gold and silver for everyone concerned.

Punishing Tver, rewarding Moscow

The payoff came in 1327, when the neighbouring principality of Tver resisted Mongol authority. The khan entrusted Kalita with putting the revolt down, and Kalita's own troops helped devastate the whole principality so thoroughly that a chronicler recorded, in plain terms, that they made the Russian land desolate - all of it except Moscow. In return, in 1328, Kalita received the Suzerain throne of Rus: from that year on, no other prince held the senior title, and Moscow became responsible for collecting the whole federation's tribute rather than merely its own.

What tribute-collecting actually built

The office turned out to be worth far more than the title attached to it. Collecting tribute from every other Rus' principality gave Moscow's princes both a legitimate reason to interfere in each of their neighbours' affairs and a steady stream of revenue that no rival principality could match. The chronicle credits Kalita's tenure with forty years of relief from Tartar raids across Northern Rus, since a khan whose tribute arrived reliably through one trusted collector had far less reason to send punitive expeditions of his own. Moscow grew rich, and stayed largely undisturbed, precisely because it made itself indispensable to the power it answered to.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Apollinary Vasnetsov · Public domain

A battle that changed nothing and everything

Two generations later, Kalita's grandson Dmitri chose a different relationship with the Horde. In 1380, rather than paying tribute to the khan Mamai, he met Mamai's army in the field at Kulikovo and defeated it outright - the first time in the century and a half since the Mongol invasion that a Rus' prince had beaten a Mongol army in open battle. Tribute resumed within two years, under a different and more threatening khan, and Moscow's submission was not in fact over. What Kulikovo established was narrower but lasting: that the arrangement Kalita had built Moscow's fortune on could, when the moment called for it, be fought rather than only managed.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The gathering of the Rus' lands

peakDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

By the middle of the fifteenth century Muscovy was still one principality among several, bordered by Novgorod's vast northern territories, by Tver to its own north, and by Lithuania to the west. Within a single reign - Ivan III's, from 1462 to 1505 - that changed so completely that contemporaries could no longer picture the Rus' lands as anything but Moscow's own.

Absorbing the neighbours, one method at a time

Ivan's acquisitions came by whatever means was available in each case. In 1463 the princes of Yaroslavl simply swore fealty and gave up their independence. In 1474 the princes of Rostov sold what remained of their own territory outright. Perm submitted in 1472. Novgorod the Great was the largest prize and the one that took force: through the 1470s Ivan's armies brought the republic and its enormous northern hinterland under direct Muscovite rule, and in the aftermath thousands of Novgorodian boyars and merchants were deported to central Muscovite provinces while Muscovite servitors were settled on the confiscated Novgorodian land in their place - a deliberate redistribution meant to make reconquest of the old republic's loyalties as difficult as its military reconquest had been.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · André Thevet · Public domain

A Byzantine marriage for a new kind of throne

In 1472 Ivan married Sophia Palaiologina, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor who had been living in Italy since Constantinople's fall to the Ottomans. The match brought Greek court ceremony, a claim to succession from Byzantium's own imperial line, and a marked change in how the Muscovite ruler began to present himself - no longer merely the senior of several tribute-paying Rus' princes but a sovereign styling himself heir to a fallen empire. The boyars resented the Greek retinue that came with her, and resented still more the ceremonial distance Ivan increasingly kept from men who had once treated their prince as scarcely more than first among equals.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The tribute that was never paid again

The last formal test of Muscovite subjection to the Golden Horde came in 1480, when the khan Ahmed brought an army to the river Ugra. Ivan took up a position facing him, then withdrew toward Moscow - a retreat that panicked the capital's own citizens, who are recorded accusing their ruler of betraying them to the Tartars rather than praising his caution. No battle was fought. Ahmed's army eventually withdrew without forcing a crossing, and the tribute relationship that had bound every Rus' prince to the Horde since 1238 was never restored. Ivan's own subjects, in the moment, did not yet see him as untouchable. What the stand at the Ugra shows is how narrow the gap still was, in 1480, between an emerging Muscovite sovereign and a nervous appanage prince whose citizens still felt entitled to reproach him to his face.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A monk with a broom

peakDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

Ivan III died in 1505 having brought Novgorod, Tver, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Perm under Moscow's own rule, but the work of absorbing every last independent or semi-independent Rus' principality was not yet finished. His son Vassilii III spent the next twenty-eight years completing it, picking off what remained one territory at a time: Pskov surrendered its own independence in 1510, Riazan followed in 1517, and Chernigov and Novgorod-Seversky were folded in by 1523 after their own last independent ruler conquered a rival prince and was promptly thrown into a Muscovite dungeon himself for his trouble.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Sigismund von Herberstein · Public domain

A city fought back from Lithuania

The most consequential single acquisition was Smolensk, seized from Rus by Lithuania early in the fifteenth century and won back by Vassilii in 1513 - restoring to Moscow a city that had been outside direct Rus' rule for a full century. Between his own father's reign and his, the territory answering to Moscow more than doubled, from a little over 15,000 square miles to at least 25,000. What Ivan III had begun as the absorption of Moscow's own last rival appanages, Vassilii finished as something closer to a single, undivided Great Russian state.

"The Empire is not yet wholly cleansed"

Contemporaries understood what was happening even as it happened. One Muscovite chronicle hailed Vassilii as the final consolidator of Rus' outright, and a story kept alive in the capital captured the same feeling more vividly still: when the last independent prince still holding an appanage under Moscow was thrown into prison, a monk was seen walking the streets of the city carrying a broom. Asked what it was for, he answered that the empire was not yet wholly cleansed, and that the time had come to sweep away the last of the dust. By the time Vassilii died in 1533, there was, in practical terms, no dust left to sweep - no rival Rus' prince remained who could still be described as anything other than Moscow's own subject.

A boy who chose his own title

endDrafted from Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912)

Ivan IV's father, Vassilii III, died when Ivan was three, leaving a minor heir and, in the source's own recorded words attributed to the adult Ivan looking back, a mother who died herself when he was still a child. What followed was a regency, and then a prolonged struggle among rival boyar clans - the princes Shuiski chief among them - who treated the young Grand Prince less as a sovereign to be served than as a prize to be controlled. One faction seized the palace by night raid. Another had a leading boyar of the rival house murdered outright. Ivan grew up watching men who owed him formal loyalty fight over who would actually rule in his name.

A model no earlier Muscovite ruler had followed

At sixteen, in 1546, Ivan told his startled court that before he married he wished to look into how his ancestors - the old Suzerain Princes of Moscow, and his more distant kinsman Vladimir Monomakh - had handled succession to the throne. The court had not expected this; Ivan's political education, by the source's own account, had proceeded in secret, without his tutors' guidance. What emerged from that private study was Ivan's own decision, formed before any minister proposed it to him, to take the title of Tsar and to be crowned to it with a formal Church rite rather than simply inheriting his father's style of Grand Prince.

Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Unknown artist · Public domain

An old legend put to a new use

The precedent Ivan reached for was a story, already old by his time, that Vladimir Monomakh - whose own mother had been a Byzantine emperor's daughter - had received imperial regalia and a solemn coronation from Constantinople itself, and that every Suzerain Prince of Moscow since had, in effect, inherited a divinely sanctioned imperial dignity through him. Whether the legend recorded any actual historical event, or was assembled from older material to serve exactly this purpose, its use in January 1547 announced something concrete: the prince crowned that month claimed to be receiving back a title his own line had always been entitled to, not inventing one.

Kremlin Armoury, Moscow · Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (1912) · Shakko · CC BY-SA 4.0

What the boyars could no longer contain

The coronation did not end the political turbulence of Ivan's youth - Moscow burned in a catastrophic fire later that same year, and a popular uprising followed it, both of which he later described in vivid, guilt-ridden language. But it marked the point at which a prince who had spent his childhood watching boyar factions fight over his throne asserted, in a single ceremony, that the office itself now stood above any of them - Tsar and Autocrat, a title no previous Muscovite ruler had formally worn, for a state that had spent nearly three centuries becoming able to support the claim.