Freedom from subjection to Khan Ahmed of the Golden Horde came in 1480. To counterbalance Ahmed's friendship with Poland–Lithuania, Ivan concluded an invaluable alliance with Khan Mengli Girei of Crimea. After a victorious campaign by Ivan in 1480, Ahmed withdrew his forces from Ivan's dominions, and although Ahmed's sons continued to worry Moscow and Crimea until their final defeat in 1502, Ivan from 1480 no longer considered himself a vassal of the Khan and entered the field of European diplomacy as an independent sovereign. By tact and diplomacy he managed to maintain his friendship with Mengli and to avoid serious trouble in Kazan for the rest of his reign.
In 1480 Ivan also had to cope with the danger of rebellion by his two brothers Andrey and Boris, who had been incensed by his high-handed appropriation of their deceased elder brother's estates. They defected with their armies to the western frontiers but eventually returned and acknowledged Ivan's territorial acquisitions and primacy.
Late reign
In 1490 Ivan's eldest son by his first wife died of gout. He had been ineptly treated by a Jewish doctor who had been brought to Russia by Sofia's brother, and Ivan suspected foul play. He now had to solve the problem of who was to be his heir—his eldest son's son Dmitry (born 1483) or his eldest son by Sofia, Vasily (born 1479). For seven years he vacillated. Then, in 1497, he nominated Dmitry as heir. Sofia, anxious to see her son assured of the throne, planned rebellion against her husband, but the plot was uncovered. Ivan disgraced Sofia and Vasily and had Dmitry crowned grand prince (1498).
However, in 1500 Vasily rebelled again and defected to the Lithuanians. Ivan was forced to compromise. At that stage of his war with Lithuania he could not risk the total alienation of his son and wife. And so, in 1502, he gave the title to Vasily (Vasily III) and imprisoned Dmitry and his mother, Yelena.
At home Ivan's policy was to centralize the administration by stripping the appanage princes of land and authority. As for the boyars, they were stripped of much of their authority and swiftly executed or imprisoned if suspected of treason. Ivan's reign saw the beginning of the pomestie system, whereby the servants of the grand prince were granted estates on a basis of life tenure and on condition of loyal service.
Ivan's last years were years of disappointment. The war against Lithuania had not ended as conclusively and satisfactorily as he had expected—much of Ukraine was still in the hands of a strangely buoyant enemy; his ecclesiastical plans for secularizing church lands had been thwarted at the Council of 1503, and the Khanate of Kazan, which had been so carefully neutralized during Ivan's reign, was beginning to rid itself of Muscovite tutelage. Ivan died in the autumn of 1505.
Assessment
In terms of political success, the 15th-century grand prince Ivan III was easily the greatest of all the descendants of Rurik, the reputed founder of Russia. No ruler of Muscovy until Peter I the Great, two centuries later, did more to consolidate and develop the achievements of his predecessors, to strengthen the authority of the monarch, or to lay the foundations for a centralized state. By means of cunning diplomacy and shrewdly calculated aggression, Ivan not only established Muscovy as a great power to be reckoned with by the rulers and diplomats of Europe but also set in motion the reconquest of the Ukraine from Poland and Lithuania.
In spite of his great achievements, Ivan died unmourned and seemingly unloved. Singularly little is known about him as a man. He was tall and thin and had a slight stoop. It is said that women fainted in his presence, so frightened were they by his awesome gaze. His only known pleasures were those of the bed and the table. His contemporaries are silent about his virtues. Yet few scholars have underestimated the role of Ivan in the creation of the Russian state, and none dispute the significance of his diplomatic and military successes. It may be that the excessive cautiousness of his character, the lack of élan and glamour, and the very dullness of the man have prevented historians from universally recognizing the appellation of “the Great,” first attributed to him by the Austrian ambassador to his son's court.
John Lister Illingworth Fennell Ed.
Additional Reading
J.L.I. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow (1962), the most detailed account of Ivan's reign in English, emphasizes his diplomacy and foreign policy.
Vasily II
▪ grand prince of Moscow
in full Vasily Vasilyevich , byname Vasily the Blind , Russian Vasily Tyomny
born 1415
died March 27, 1462, Moscow
grand prince of Moscow from 1425 to 1462.
Although the 10-year-old Vasily II was named by his father Vasily I (ruled Moscow 1389–1425) to succeed him as the grand prince of Moscow and of Vladimir, Vasily's rule was challenged by his uncle Yury and his cousins Vasily the Squint-Eyed and Dmitry Shemyaka. After a long, chaotic, and bitter struggle, during which Vasily not only temporarily lost his throne both to Yury (1434) and to Dmitry Shemyaka (1446–47) but was also blinded by Dmitry (1446), Vasily recovered his position (1447) and ruled Muscovy for another 15 years.
Despite the prolonged internal discord, which finally ended in 1452, Muscovy made great strides toward becoming a large, politically consolidated, powerful Russian state during Vasily's reign. The Russian Church asserted its independence from the patriarch at Constantinople; and the state of Muscovy, in an effort to enlarge its territories, absorbed most of the neighbouring principalities. It gained suzerainty over the Grand Principality of Ryazan (1447) and the city of Vyatka (1460; now Kirov). To pursue his policy of aggrandizement without foreign interference, Vasily concluded a non-aggression pact with Lithuania in 1449. He could not, however, avoid intermittent conflict with the rival Tatar hordes bordering his lands on the south and east, one of which tried unsuccessfully to storm Moscow in 1451. Nevertheless, he welcomed individual Tatars at his court and, encouraging them to enter his service, established a vassal Tatar horde to defend his state's southeastern frontier (c. 1453). By the end of his reign he had also substantially reduced the domination of the Tatar khan, who formally remained his suzerain, over Muscovy.
Vasily III
▪ grand prince of Moscow
in full Vasily Ivanovich
born 1479
died Dec. 3, 1533, Moscow
grand prince of Moscow from 1505 to 1533. Succeeding his father, Ivan III (ruled Moscow 1462–1505), Vasily completed his father's policy of consolidating the numerous independent Russian principalities into a united Muscovite state by annexing Pskov (1510), Ryazan (1517), and Starodub and Novgorod-Seversk (now Novgorod-Seversky) by 1523. He also strengthened his growing state by capturing Smolensk from Lithuania in 1514. His forces were defeated by the Lithuanians at Orsha (1514), however, and Muscovy also suffered devastating raids by Tatars of both the Crimea and Kazan. Nevertheless, Vasily was loyally supported by the metropolitan Daniel, who intrigued in his favour and sanctioned his canonically unjustifiable divorce from his barren first wife (1525). Vasily overcame the opposition of those boyars who objected to his autocratic tendencies and transmitted an enlarged, powerful, centralized state to his son Ivan IV the Terrible.