Vasili III of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Vasili III Ivanovich was born on the 25th of March 1479, and by the time he died on the 3rd of December 1533, he had transformed Russia from a collection of competing principalities into something approaching a single, centralized state. His Christian name was Gavriil; his monastic name, taken on his deathbed, was Varlaam. Between those two names lay a reign of nearly three decades that consumed rivals, swallowed autonomous territories, and pushed Russian arms as far west as the great Lithuanian fortress of Smolensk.

  He was the second son of Ivan III and his second wife, Sophia Paleologue, a woman of Byzantine royal blood whose influence would echo through her son's entire life. Yet Vasili began his political career not as a prince with a clear future, but as a boy whose older nephew stood between him and the throne. How he got from that precarious position to ruling all of Russia is a story of palace intrigue, well-timed reversals of fortune, and a father's changing loyalties. And when he finally sat on the grand princely throne, the questions that shaped his reign were urgent ones: could he hold together what his father had built? Could he push further? And what would the cost be to those who stood in his way?

• 2. From Second Son to Grand Prince

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  Ivan III's eldest son, Ivan Molodoy, died before his father, which opened an immediate question of succession. Dmitry Ivanovich, the young son of Ivan Molodoy, became heir presumptive in 1490 and was elevated to co-ruler in 1498, after a conspiracy by Vasili's supporters was uncovered and crushed. Vasili himself appeared finished.

  Then the ground shifted. On the 21st of March 1499, Ivan III forgave his son and granted him the title of grand prince of Novgorod and Pskov. In March 1501, Vasili received the Beloozero principality. By the following year, Dmitry and his mother Elena of Moldavia had fallen out of favor entirely. On the 11th of April 1502, they were placed under house arrest. Three days later, Ivan III formally named Vasili his successor, seating him on the grand princely throne of Vladimir and Moscow.

  The proclamation was recorded in language that left nothing ambiguous: Ivan III declared that he showed favor upon his son Vasilii, blessed him, and seated him on the grand princely throne of Vladimir and Moscow and of all Russia, calling him Autocrat. It was a complete reversal of fortune, and it came within just a few years of Vasili's apparent disgrace. That volatility of Ivan's court would prove formative for the man Vasili became.

• 3. The Bride-Show and the Marriage Question

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  In the summer of 1505, according to the diplomat Sigismund von Herberstein, some 1,500 noble girls were assembled for a formal bride-show. Vasili chose Solomonia Saburova, and the two were married on the 4th of September 1505. The custom itself had been introduced by his mother, Sophia Paleologue, though she died before the wedding took place.

  For over twenty years, the marriage produced no heir. By 1526, when Vasili was 47 years old, the absence of a successor had become a dynastic crisis. Solomonia, conscious of her husband's disappointment, turned to sorcerers and pilgrimages. Neither helped. Vasili consulted the boyars and announced he did not trust his brothers to govern Russia, so he forbade them from marrying anyone, removing any alternative line of succession.

  The divorce he engineered was not clean. A divorce on grounds of the wife's sterility was unlawful under church law, so Vasili falsely accused Solomonia of witchcraft. He exiled her to a monastery, exiled the clergy who objected, and married Princess Elena Glinskaya, the niece of his former ally Michael Glinski and the daughter of a Serbian princess. Many boyars disapproved; Elena had been raised Catholic. Vasili was so taken with her that he trimmed his beard to appear younger, defying Russian social convention. In time, Elena gave birth to a son who would become Ivan IV, and three years after that, to a second son named Yuri.

• 4. Absorbing the Last Free Cities

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  Pskov had governed itself as a republic, complete with a veche, the citizen assembly that rang its bell to call the people together. Vasili ended that in January 1510. In 1509, while in Veliky Novgorod, he ordered the Pskov mayor and city representatives to come to him, along with anyone who had grievances against them. When they arrived at the start of 1510, on the feast of Epiphany, the Pskovites were accused of distrusting the Grand Duke. Their governors were executed.

  The Pskovites asked Vasili to accept them into his patrimony. He ordered the veche canceled. At what would be the last assembly in the history of the Pskov Republic, the citizens voted not to resist. On the 13th of January, the veche bell was taken down and sent, with tears, to the Snetogorsky Monastery before being transported to Moscow. On the 24th of January, Vasili arrived in Pskov and treated the city as his father had treated Novgorod in 1478. Three hundred of the most prominent families were resettled to Moscow lands; their villages were handed to Moscow service-class people.

  Ryazan followed a similar path. In 1517, Vasili summoned the Ryazan prince Ivan V Ivanovich to Moscow after learning he had attempted an alliance with the Crimean Khan. Ivan was taken into custody, later tonsured a monk, and imprisoned in a monastery. Vasili claimed the principality in 1521. The Starodub Principality was annexed in 1523, and the Principality of Novgorod-Seversk followed when its prince walked into the same trap as the prince of Ryazan.

• 5. The Smolensk Campaigns

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  Smolensk was described as the great eastern fortress of Lithuania, and Vasili wanted it badly. His opening move came in 1508, when he exploited the disorder that followed the death of the Lithuanian prince Alexander Jagiellon and received the rebellious Lithuanian boyar Michael Glinski warmly in Moscow. A brief war with Lithuania concluded in 1509 with peace terms that recognized Ivan III's earlier conquests.

  In 1512 a new war began. On the 19th of December, Vasili, his brother Yuri Ivanovich, and Dmitry Zhilka marched out. Glinski provided artillery and engineers, and Smolensk was besieged, but the first attempt failed. On the 14th of June the following year, Vasili sent commanders back to Smolensk but remained at Borovsk himself. That siege too came to nothing; the defenders rebuilt what had been destroyed, and the Russian army withdrew to Moscow in March 1513.

  The third attempt, launched on the 8th of July 1514 with Vasili accompanied by his brothers Yuri and Semyon, succeeded. A new siege began on the 29th of July. The artillery, commanded by the gunner Stefan, inflicted heavy losses on the defenders. That same day, the city's governor Yuri Sologub and the clergy came to Vasili and agreed to surrender. On the 31st of July, the residents of Smolensk swore allegiance to the Grand Duke, and Vasili entered the city on the 1st of August.

  Glinski expected a reward, specifically Smolensk itself as a fiefdom. Vasili refused. Glinski opened secret negotiations with King Sigismund I, the conspiracy was exposed, and Glinski was imprisoned in Moscow. The Russian army later suffered a heavy defeat at the Battle of Orsha, but the Lithuanians never recovered Smolensk. A treaty in 1522 formalized the situation: a five-year truce with no prisoner exchange, and Moscow holding Smolensk. The truce was subsequently extended to 1534.

• 6. The Steppe Frontier

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  South and east of Moscow, the threats were different. In 1518, the Moscow-friendly Shah Ali Khan took the throne of the Khanate of Kazan, but by 1521 he had been overthrown by Sahib I Giray, a Crimean ally. That same year, the Crimean Khan Mehmed I Giray, honoring his alliance with Sigismund I, launched a full invasion of Russia. The Kazan Khan joined forces with the Crimean army near Kolomna.

  The Muscovite army was beaten on the Oka River and driven back. The Tatars reached the walls of Moscow. Vasili himself left the capital for Volokolamsk to raise an army. Mehmed Giray had no intention of storming Moscow; he devastated the surrounding country and then turned south, worried about threats from the Astrakhan people and the army Vasili was assembling. Before he left, he extracted from Vasili a written document formalizing Russia's status as a tributary vassal of the Crimean Khanate.

  The document nearly became a weapon. On the way south, the khan besieged Pereyaslavl-Ryazansky and demanded the city surrender, citing the charter. The city's voivode, Khabar Simsky, whose family name was Ivan Vasilyevich Obrazets-Dobrynsky, invited the Tatar ambassadors to bring the document to his headquarters. He kept the letter and dispersed the Tatar army with cannons.

  In 1521, Vasili also received an emissary of the Safavid Shah Ismail I, who proposed an Irano-Russian alliance against the Ottoman Empire. The following years brought further campaigns. In 1523, after another massacre of Russian merchants in Kazan, Vasili declared war, devastated the khanate, and on the return journey founded the city of Vasilsursk at the confluence of the Sura River and the Volga, intended as a secure trading post with the Kazan Tatars. In 1524, Prince Ivan Belsky led a 150,000-strong army against the Tatar capital. By 1531-1532, Vasili had placed the pretender Cangali Khan on the Kazan throne, establishing Russian influence across the Volga region.

• 7. Power, Church, and the Title Question

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  Vasili believed that nothing should limit the power of the Grand Prince. That conviction shaped his dealings with everyone, including the church. He used ecclesiastical support as a tool, backing whichever church faction served his current needs. During his marriage to Solomonia, he supported the non-covetous movement in church politics. After his divorce and the quarrel it caused, he switched support to the Josephites, who backed him in return.

  Those who crossed him paid. In 1521, Metropolitan Bishop Varlaam was exiled for refusing to take part in Vasili's campaign against Prince Vasili Ivanovich Shemyachich. The princes Vasily Vasilyevich Shuisky and Ivan Vorotynsky were expelled. In 1525, the diplomat and statesman Ivan Bersen-Beklemishev was executed for criticizing Vasili's policies, specifically his rejection of Greek influence that had come to Russia through Sophia Paleologue. Maxim the Greek and Vassian Patrikeev, leaders of the non-covetous faction, were sentenced at church councils; some to death, some to imprisonment in monasteries.

  The question of the title "tsar" was handled with unusual care. Unlike his son Ivan IV, Vasili did not officially claim the title within Russia. In his foreign correspondence after 1514, he used a different formulation. In diplomatic documents produced for the Holy Roman Empire, he was called tsar, grand prince, or, by the Emperor Maximilian I, kayser. In 1514, Maximilian I implicitly recognized the Russians' claim to equal standing among European monarchs, whether by accident or design. That letter was later used by Peter the Great when he proclaimed himself imperator of Russia. Vasili received explicit praise for his restraint on the title from the abbot of the Novgorod Khutyn Monastery, Theodosius, who said that in everything Vasili showed an example of the sovereign, and for the sake of humility he did not call himself a tsar.

• 8. Death and Succession

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  Vasili was out hunting on horseback near Volokolamsk when he felt a severe pain in his right hip, caused by an abscess. He was carried to the village of Kolp, where two German doctors visited him and failed to stop the infection. Vasili asked to be returned to Moscow. He was kept at the Saint Joseph Cathedral along the route, and by the 25th of November 1533 he had reached the capital.

  His last request was to be made a monk before he died. He took on the monastic name Varlaam, the same name as the metropolitan he had exiled twelve years earlier, and died at midnight on the 3rd of December 1533. He left behind a son, the future Ivan IV, who was still a child, and a Russia that stretched from the Baltic to the Volga, with Smolensk held in the west and Russian influence reaching into Kazan in the east. The regency that followed would be held by his widow Elena Glinskaya, the same woman whose Catholic upbringing had once scandalized the boyars.