Tsardom of Russia
The Tsardom of Russia began on the 16th of January 1547, when Ivan IV was crowned tsar and grand prince of all Russia in a ceremony modeled on the rituals of the Byzantine emperors. Before that day, his realm was known simply as the Grand Principality of Moscow. After it, he ruled what the coronation document called "the Great Russian Tsardom." The state endured for a century and three-quarters, expanding at an average of 35,000 square kilometers per year between 1550 and 1700. By the time Peter the Great proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, Russia had swallowed the Volga River corridor, pushed into Siberia to the Pacific coast, and fought wars against Poland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Ottoman Empire. What drove that expansion? What held so vast a realm together when its tsars were sometimes children, sometimes tyrants, sometimes both? And how did a landlocked medieval principality transform itself into a European great power? Those questions run through every chapter of this story.
State scribes Ivan Cherny and Mikhail Medovartsev wrote the country's name as "Росиа" (Rosia) in the 1480s. Medovartsev also used the phrase "the sceptre of Russian lordship." That new spelling was a transliteration from the Greek name for Rus', and it spread slowly. By 1515 it appeared carved in an inscription on the western portal of the Transfiguration Cathedral of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery in Yaroslavl. It appeared on the icon case of the Theotokos of Vladimir in 1514. Within a century, Rossiya had largely displaced the older form Rus' in official documents, though the two names continued to be used side by side.
Much of Western Europe, particularly its Catholic regions, stubbornly called the country Moscovia. Historians Alexander Zimin and Anna Khoroshkevich traced this habit to the political interests of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which competed with Moscow for control of the western regions of Rus' and had reasons to keep the Muscovite name from implying a broader sovereignty. The Jesuit network amplified the preference for Moscovia across Catholic Europe. In Northern Europe and at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, however, the country was known by its own name.
Ambassador Sigismund von Herberstein, who represented the Holy Roman Emperor in Russia, used both names in his writings and recorded that Russians themselves rejected Moscovia. French captain Jacques Margeret, who served in Russia in the early 17th century, was direct: foreigners make "a mistake when they call them Muscovites and not Russians. When they are asked what nation they are, they respond 'Russac', which means 'Russians'." John Milton understood the ambiguity; his posthumously published work opened with "The Empire of Moscovia, or as others call it, Russia." In England, notable visitors Giles Fletcher and Samuel Collins both used Russia in their respective works of 1591 and 1668.
Ivan III married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, in 1472. That marriage carried symbolic weight beyond any treaty. The Moscow court adopted Byzantine court terms, rituals, titles, and emblems, including the double-headed eagle, which remains in the Russian coat of arms today. The Byzantine Empire had fallen to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, leaving its traditions and claims without an obvious heir.
The Slavic word Tsar is an adaptation of the Roman Imperial title Caesar. By assuming it, the sovereign of Moscow signaled that he stood on a par with emperors. The hegumen Philotheus of Pskov made that logic explicit in 1510, arguing that after Constantinople fell, the Russian tsar was the only remaining legitimate Orthodox ruler and that Moscow was the Third Rome, the final successor to both Rome and Constantinople. The concept would shape Russian political culture for centuries.
Under Ivan IV, the term autokrator shifted in meaning. In earlier usage it had simply meant an independent ruler. During his reign from 1533 to 1584, it came to imply unlimited, autocratic power. By the 17th century, the Tsar Feodor III was using the phrase "Great Russian Tsardom" to signify an imperial and absolutist state governing both Russian and non-Russian peoples.
Ivan IV became Grand Prince of Moscow in 1533 at the age of three. The Shuysky and Belsky factions of the boyars then spent years fighting for control of the regency. When Ivan finally assumed the throne in 1547, he was surrounded by advisers, and his early reign produced a series of substantial reforms: a new law code in the 1550s, a revamped military, and a reorganized system of local government. The Russia he inherited covered 2.8 million square kilometers; by 1584 it had grown to 5.4 million.
The sobriquet "Grozny" attached to him is commonly translated as "Terrible," but that translation is imprecise. Vladimir Dal defined the older Russian sense of the word as "Courageous, magnificent, magisterial and keeping enemies in fear, but people in obedience." The connotations of defectiveness or moral evil came later in English usage.
In foreign wars, Ivan struck hard early. He defeated and annexed the Khanate of Kazan in 1552 on the middle Volga, then took the Astrakhan Khanate in 1556. These victories gave Russia control of the entire Volga River and opened access to Central Asia. The push northwest toward the Baltic Sea proved far harder. In 1558, Ivan invaded Livonia and found himself drawn into a twenty-five-year war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, and Denmark. He never secured a foothold on the Baltic coast.
In 1565, Ivan divided Russia into two administrative zones: his private domain, the oprichnina, and the public realm, the zemshchina. His agents in the oprichnina attacked boyars, merchants, and commoners, executing some and seizing land. A decade of terror culminated in the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570. The policies broke the economic and political power of the families best capable of administering Russia, drove peasants from the land, and pushed serfdom closer to legal reality. By 1572 Ivan abandoned the oprichnina, but the damage shaped everything that followed.
Feodor, the son who succeeded Ivan IV, took little interest in governing. Actual power fell to his brother-in-law Boris Godunov, who abolished Yuri's Day, the one period each year when serfs were legally free to move between landowners. The Patriarchate of Moscow was proclaimed in 1589 during Feodor's reign, a landmark that completed the Russian Orthodox Church's evolution into a fully independent institution.
When Feodor died without an heir in 1598, the Rurik Dynasty ended. A Zemsky Sobor, a national assembly of boyars, church officials, and commoners, proclaimed Godunov tsar. Several boyar factions refused to accept the decision. Then widespread crop failures brought the Russian famine of 1601-1603. A man emerged claiming to be Tsarevich Demetrius, Ivan IV's son who had died in 1591. This False Dmitriy I gathered support in Poland and marched toward Moscow. Historians believe Godunov might have survived the crisis, but he died in 1605. False Dmitriy I entered Moscow and was crowned tsar after the murder of Tsar Feodor II, Godunov's son.
What followed was nearly fifteen years of civil war, foreign occupation, and cascading pretenders. False Dmitry II established a mock court in the village of Tushino while allied with Poland. In 1610, Polish and Lithuanian forces captured Vasili IV of Russia and occupied the Kremlin. A group of Russian boyars signed a treaty that year recognizing Wladyslaw IV Vasa, son of Polish King Sigismund III Vasa, as tsar. False Dmitry III appeared in Swedish-occupied territories in 1611 but was quickly apprehended and executed.
The turning point came from Nizhny Novgorod. A volunteer army, financed by the Stroganov merchants and blessed by the Orthodox Church, formed there. Led by Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin, it drove the Polish and Lithuanian forces from the Kremlin. In 1613, a Zemsky Sobor proclaimed the boyar Mikhail Romanov as tsar, beginning three centuries of Romanov rule.
The number of government departments, called prikazy, grew from twenty-two in 1613 to eighty by mid-century. These departments often had overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions, yet through provincial governors the central government regulated social groups, trade, manufacturing, and the Orthodox Church alike. The autocracy survived weak and corrupt rulers because the bureaucracy kept functioning regardless of who held the throne.
The Sobornoye Ulozheniye, a comprehensive legal code introduced in 1649, codified the extent of state control. Peasants were officially attached to the land they farmed. Runaway serfs became state fugitives, subject to return by force. Middle-class urban tradesmen and craftsmen were assessed taxes and forbidden to change their place of residence. All segments of the population were subject to military levy and special taxes. The nobility, in exchange for mandatory state service primarily in the military, received land and the labor of bound peasants.
Early in the reign of Tsar Aleksey, his chief minister Boris Morozov abused his position by exploiting the populace. Aleksey dismissed him in 1648 in the wake of the Salt Riot in Moscow. That dismissal did not relieve the underlying pressure. In the 1650s and 1660s, peasant escapes multiplied. A major uprising swept through the Volga region in 1670 and 1671. Stenka Razin, a Cossack from the Don River region, led an alliance of wealthy Cossacks and escaped serfs that occupied major cities along the Volga and threatened Moscow before tsarist troops finally defeated the rebels. Razin was publicly tortured and executed. The revolt passed into Russian memory as an act of panache that later generations would revisit.
In 1581, the Stroganov merchant family, driven by interest in the fur trade, hired a Cossack leader named Yermak Timofeyevich to push into western Siberia. Yermak defeated the Khanate of Sibir and claimed the territories west of the Ob and Irtysh Rivers for Russia. Resistance from indigenous peoples was limited, and the advance continued relentlessly.
From bases at Mangazeya and other outposts, merchants, traders, and explorers moved east from the Ob to the Yenisei River, then to the Lena, and on to the Pacific coast. In 1648, Cossack Semyon Dezhnyov navigated the passage between Asia and America. By mid-century, Russians had reached the Amur River and were at the edge of Qing Chinese territory. After a period of Sino-Russian border conflicts, peace came in 1689 through the Treaty of Nerchinsk. Russia surrendered its claims to the Amur Valley but gained access to the region east of Lake Baikal and a trade route to Beijing.
The border with the Dzungar Khanate was eventually drawn from the Irtysh to the Yenisei, the result of repeated raids and invasions that kept the frontier unstable for years. The Siberian expansion transformed the character of the Russian state, adding vast territories, new peoples, and resources that would matter deeply in the centuries ahead.
Peter the Great was born in 1672 and became ruler in his own right in 1696. He traveled incognito through Western Europe, returned impressed, and began dismantling the habits of the old Muscovite court. He required the nobility to wear Western European clothing and shave their beards, a demand the boyars resisted bitterly. He banned arranged marriages among the nobility. He brought the Orthodox Church under state control. His administrative reforms created a Governing Senate in 1711, the Collegium in 1717, and the Table of Ranks in 1722.
Many pious Russians were disturbed by the scale and speed of the changes. The torture and killing of Peter's own son for allegedly plotting rebellion, and the immense suffering caused by projects like the construction of Saint Petersburg, led some to call Peter the Antichrist. The Great Northern War against Sweden absorbed much of his reign. Sweden was eventually defeated, and peace came in 1721.
Russia annexed the Baltic coast from Sweden and parts of Finland, acquiring territory that would become the site of the new capital, Saint Petersburg. The victory in the Great Northern War eclipsed Sweden as a great power and established Russia as a permanent force in European politics. Peter also fought Persia and gained territory in the Caucasus, though those gains were returned after his death in 1725 when an alliance between Russia and Persia was established. On the strength of the Swedish victory, Peter proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, and the Tsardom that Ivan IV had established 174 years earlier formally ceased to exist.
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Common questions
When did the Tsardom of Russia begin and end?
The Tsardom of Russia began on the 16th of January 1547, when Ivan IV was crowned tsar and grand prince of all Russia. It ended in 1721, when Peter the Great proclaimed the Russian Empire after his victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War.
How fast did the Tsardom of Russia expand its territory?
From 1550 to 1700, Russia grew by an average of 35,000 square kilometers per year. During the reign of Ivan IV alone, the territory expanded from 2.8 to 5.4 million square kilometers between 1533 and 1584.
What was the oprichnina in Tsarist Russia?
The oprichnina was the private domain that Ivan IV carved out of Russia in 1565, separating it from the public realm called the zemshchina. In this domain his agents attacked boyars, merchants, and commoners, executing some and confiscating land. Ivan abandoned the practice in 1572 after a decade of terror that culminated in the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570.
Who was False Dmitriy I and what role did he play in the Time of Troubles?
False Dmitriy I was a pretender who claimed to be Tsarevich Demetrius, the son of Ivan IV who had died in 1591. He gathered support in Poland and marched on Moscow after the death of Boris Godunov in 1605. He entered Moscow and was crowned tsar that year, following the murder of Tsar Feodor II.
What did the Sobornoye Ulozheniye of 1649 do to Russian serfs?
The Sobornoye Ulozheniye, the comprehensive legal code introduced in 1649, officially attached peasants to the land they farmed and made runaway serfs state fugitives. Landlords received complete power over their serfs, and middle-class urban workers were simultaneously forbidden from changing their place of residence.
How did Russia conquer Siberia during the Tsardom period?
The Stroganov merchant family financed the initial push in 1581, hiring Cossack leader Yermak Timofeyevich to lead an expedition that defeated the Khanate of Sibir. Russian explorers and traders then pushed east from the Ob River to the Yenisei, then to the Lena, reaching the Pacific coast by mid-century. By 1648, Cossack Semyon Dezhnyov had navigated the passage between Asia and America.
All sources
22 references cited across the entry
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- 7bookRussia under the old regimeRichard Pipes
- 8bookByzantium and the SlavsDimitri Obolensky — St. Vladimir's Seminary Press — 1994
- 10bookReign of Terror: Ivan IVRuslan G. Skrynnikov — BRILL — 20 October 2015
- 11bookScenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas IIRichard Wortman — Princeton University Press — 26 March 2006
- 17journalMyths, Politics and the Not-so-New World OrderJacobsen, C. G. — 1993
- 18journalBooks Abroad: An International Literary QuarterlyNoth, Ernst Erich — University of Oklahoma Press — 1941
- 20bookRussia: A HistoryGregory L. Freeze — Oxford University Press — 2009