Ivan III
Ivan III ended the Mongol yoke without fighting a battle, absorbed Novgorod, and tripled the territory of the Moscow state. He reigned for forty-three years and is called the Great in Russia and almost unknown outside it. The absorption of the other Russian principalities was done steadily and mostly without war - Yaroslavl, Rostov, Tver - and the exception was Novgorod, a merchant republic with a territory reaching to the White Sea and a habit of governing itself through a town assembly. It leaned towards Lithuania for protection, which gave him the pretext. He beat its army at the Shelon in 1471, took the city in 1478, abolished the assembly, and carried its bell to Moscow; several thousand families were deported and replaced with Moscow servitors. In 1480 Akhmat of the Great Horde came to enforce the tribute Ivan had stopped paying. The two armies faced each other across the Ugra river for weeks. Neither crossed. Akhmat withdrew in November as the river froze and his Lithuanian allies failed to appear, and was killed the following year. That non-event is conventionally the end of two hundred and forty years of subjection. He married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, took the double-headed eagle and the title of sovereign of all Rus, brought Italian architects to rebuild the Kremlin in brick, and issued the law code of 1497 - which also fixed the first legal restriction on peasants leaving their land, the beginning of serfdom. He is the first Russian ruler to use the word autocrat, which in its Byzantine sense meant a sovereign owing tribute to nobody rather than a despot. His court adopted Byzantine ceremonial along with the eagle, and the notion that Moscow was a third Rome was formulated by a monk during his son's reign. The Kremlin walls and cathedrals that stand today are substantially his, built by architects brought from Milan and Bologna.
- Lived: 1440 CE – 1505 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: ruler
