Ivan I Kalita
Ivan I made Moscow the centre of Russia by collecting the Mongols' taxes for them, and his nickname, Kalita, means moneybag. Moscow at his accession was a minor town in a crowded field of principalities, its position on a river junction useful but not decisive, and its princes junior members of a junior branch. What Ivan understood was that the Horde had made the grand princely title an administrative franchise rather than a crown: whoever held the patent collected the tribute from the other princes and remitted it to Sarai, and kept whatever the arrangement yielded. In 1327 the people of Tver killed a Mongol envoy and his escort. Ivan went to Sarai, returned with a Mongol army, and destroyed Tver, his chief rival, on the Horde's behalf. The khan gave him the patent, and Moscow held it, with two brief interruptions, for the next century and a half. He used the revenue to buy villages and whole districts outright, to lend money to weaker princes against their land, and to keep his territory free of raids - contemporaries noted forty years of quiet, which brought settlers and taxpayers in from everywhere else. He also persuaded the metropolitan of the Russian church to move his residence from Vladimir to Moscow, which gave a merchant town the prestige it entirely lacked. None of it was heroic and all of it compounded. His grandson was able to fight the Horde in the field because of what Ivan accumulated by serving it. He was buried in the Archangel Cathedral he had built inside the Kremlin, which became the burial church of the Moscow rulers for the next three centuries. Contemporary chroniclers, most of them writing in monasteries his money had endowed, treat him kindly. The forty years of peace he bought are the reason the population of the Moscow lands grew while its rivals' shrank.
- Lived: 1288 CE – 1340 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: ruler
