Who Was the First Tsar of Russia?
On 16 January 1547, the Sabornaya tserkov’ Uspeniya Presvyatoy Bogoroditsy (the Dormition Cathedral) of the Moscow Kremlin was the site of the venchanie na tsarstvo of Ivan IV Vasilyevich. The young Grand Prince, seventeen, was anointed by the Metropolitan Makarii, and was given the new title of Tsar i Velikiy Knyaz’ Vseya Rusi — Tsar and Grand Prince of All the Russias. The “Caesar” title, derived from the Greek Kaisar, was the same as the title of the Eastern Roman Emperor and was held to be a successor title to the now-fallen Romanov Constantinople. Ivan would be called “the Terrible” (Groznyi) only from the nineteenth century; the sixteenth-century sources call him “Ivan Vasilyevich” or “the Tsar.” (Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible, 2005; Fennell, Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible, 1961; Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1987).
The coronation of 1547 was the formal end of the Grand Principality of Moscow and the start of the Tsardom of Muscovy.
The boy-king
Ivan was born on 25 August 1530 to Grand Prince Vasily III and Elena Glinskaya. Vasily died on 4 December 1533, leaving Ivan as Grand Prince at the age of three. Elena Glinskaya was regent until her death in 1538, possibly by poison; thereafter, the regency was in the hands of the boyar cliques led by the princes Shuiskii, Belskii, and the dvoryane of the Bityagovsky circle. The 1543 bunt of Andrei Shuiskii in the Kremlin; the murder of Ivan’s uncle Andrei Ivanovich in 1533; the murder of the voevoda Prince Dmitry Belskii in 1541 — these are the scenes of the boy-king’s childhood. In 1546 Ivan took Makarii of Moscow to be his s’vetit’ (adviser), and on 13 January 1547 the veche of the Moscow dvoryanstvo and the gosudarev sobor of the boyary and the duma agreed to the pomazanie (anointing) and the new title (Madariaga, 2005; Fennell, 1961).
The Izbraynaya Rada
The first decade of Ivan’s personal rule was conducted with the Izbraynaya Rada — the Chosen Council — a body of men close to the Tsar: the Metropolitan Makarii, the dumnyi dvorets’s head Andrei Kurbsky, the dvoryanin Aleksei Adashev, the priest Sylvester, the Tsar’s kaznachey (treasurer) V. G. Tula. The Rada drafted the 1550 Sudebnik (the new legal code of 1550, 100 articles, the first complete re-statement of Muscovite law since the 1497 Sudebnik), reorganised the pomestnaya sistema (the pomest’ye land grant), and created the strel’tsy (musketeer regiments) of 1,000 men in Moscow in 1550, expanded to 7,000 by 1552. The Rada was dissolved c. 1560 (Crummey, 1987; Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 6th ed., 2000).
Kazan and Astrakhan
The fall of Kazan to Ivan’s army under Prince Andrei Kurbsky on 2 October 1552 (the Kazanskaya ikona Bozhiyey Materi of the icon-campaign) opened the Volga. The 1556 campaign by the voivode P. I. Sheremetev against the Astrakhan Khanate ended the Tatar successor state of the Golden Horde. The conquest of Kazan was commemorated by the building of the Blagoveshchenskiy sobor (Cathedral of the Annunciation) of Kazan (1561), the Bogoyavlenskiy monastery in Moscow, and the Ivan Velikiy bell tower of 1508. The next two generations of Russian expansion, into Siberia under Yermak (1581–1585) and into the steppe, were a direct consequence of the khanate conquests (Madariaga, 2005; Fennell, 1961).
The Livonian War and the Oprichnina
The Livonian War (1558–1583) was the largest sustained military campaign of the reign. The 1,200,000 army of 1572, the last year of the sokha recruitment, was the most expensive single-year mobilisation of the period. The Livonian War, against Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, and Denmark, was lost. The Oprichnina of 1565–1572 was the domovye counter-elite. The oprichnyi dvor (the new court) was 6,000 oprichniki in 1565; by 1572, 6,000 had been killed, 12,000 had been transferred, and the Oprichnina had been abolished. The Moscow suburb of Novgorod was sacked on 9 January 1570 — 4,000 killed in the first day, 15,000 by 13 February, the official Russian count. The death of the Tsar’s heir Ivan Ivanovich on 19 November 1581 — killed by the Tsar’s own staff in a fit of rage — sealed the succession (Riasanovsky, 2000; Madariaga, 2005; Crummey, 1987).
The succession
Ivan IV died on 18 March 1584 in Moscow; the Gosudarev postav was kept in the kreml’ and the pristol’nyi regalii were placed in the Oruzheynaya palata (the Armory). The succession was to Ivan’s son Feodor I, the “Bell-Tolstoi” Tsar of 1584–1598, the last of the Rurikid line. The 1598 death of Feodor I and the end of the Rurikid dynasty produced the Smuta (the Time of Troubles). The next Tsar of Russia would be Boris Godunov, the Rurikid’s first cousin. The title of Tsar would not be abolished until 22 October 1721, when Peter I would assume the title of Imperator (Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, 2001; Madariaga, 2005).