The First Tsar, and the Oprichnina
The coronation of 1547 was a claim about inheritance. Grand prince was a title inside the Russian system; tsar was the Slavonic form of caesar, used for the Byzantine emperors and, awkwardly, for the khans, and taking it asserted that Moscow had succeeded Constantinople rather than Sarai. The first half of the reign supports the claim. A new law code in 1550, an assembly of the land, a permanent musketeer corps, reform of local government, and the conquest of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556 - which gave Russia the whole Volga, opened Siberia to the fur trade, and made a Slavic principality into a multi-ethnic empire containing large Muslim populations. Then it came apart. His wife Anastasia died in 1560 and he became convinced the boyars had poisoned her; the Livonian War, begun in 1558 for a Baltic port, turned into a twenty-five-year defeat against Poland and Sweden. In December 1564 he left Moscow, announced his abdication, and returned only on the condition that he could punish whom he liked. He then divided the country, taking a third of it as the oprichnina, his personal domain, policed by six thousand men in black riding black horses with a dog's head and a broom at the saddle. Confiscations, deportations and public executions followed for seven years, reaching their worst at Novgorod in 1570, where a forged letter produced five weeks of killing in his own second city. The conquest of Kazan was commemorated by the cathedral on Red Square that everyone now calls St Basil's, and it made Russia a state governing large numbers of Muslims - the first European power to do so on that scale and by conquest rather than reconquest. The oprichnina was abolished in 1572 after its troops failed to stop a Crimean raid that burned Moscow, which is a plain verdict on what it was good for. Ivan killed his own eldest son and heir with a staff in 1581 during a quarrel. The throne passed to his second son Feodor, who was incapable of ruling, and the dynasty founded by Ivan Kalita ended with him in 1598.
- Year: 1547 CE
- Category: Political
