Acquiring Novgorod and its hinterland gave Moscow a toehold on the dynamic Baltic at a time of momentous changes in northern European trade. The German Hansa had weakened over the fifteenth century with the rise of stronger states, notably Poland-Lithuania, the Netherlands, England, and Sweden. Trade had been shifting from Novgorod and nearby Pskov to Livonian ports: Reval/Tallinn, Dorpat/Tartu, Narva/Rugodiv, and Riga. Ivan III tried to capitalize on Livonian trade by founding Ivangorod (1492) on the Gulf of Finland opposite Narva and by closing down the Hansa office in Novgorod (1494, for twenty years), expelling its seasonally resident German merchants. Ivangorod never became a flourishing trade center; merchants and trade turned from Novgorod to the Swedish port of Vyborg on the Gulf of Finland or to Livonian towns. Only gradually in the next century did trade revive through Novgorod, exporting goods such as flax, wax, hemp, tallow, hides, honey, and leather from the rural hinterland.
The conquest of Novgorod did not bring Muscovy riches in furs. Novgorod's fur market had collapsed in the fifteenth century, for reasons including political instability, decline of the Hansa, and the waning of the fashion for squirrel in Europe, while squirrel was the only fur left available in Novgorod's forest. With robust demand for luxury furs from Europe and the Ottoman empire (where precious Russian furs were incorporated into the regalia and insignia ofhigh political office), Moscow merchants went north to the White Sea to the Finns, Karelians, Swedes, and Laplanders, but for truly rich luxury furs, Moscow crossed the Urals, which brought it face to face with the khanates of Siberia and particularly Kazan.
Kazan had been a major emporium for the Volga fur trade since at least the ninth century when the Volga Bulgars controlled the city and its fur-rich hinterland in the Perm and Urals lands to Kazan's north and east. By the second half of the fifteenth century the khanate of Kazan reigned solidly over this age-old entrepot. Here merchants from the Ottoman empire, the northern Caucasus, Persia, steppe nomads, and Central Asia sold silks, spices, fish, salt, livestock, rice, nuts, and oils, in exchange for European woolens, Russian linen, leather goods, hides, weapons, salt, and luxury furs. Situated at the confluence of the Kama and Volga Rivers, Kazan controlled access to passes across the Urals leading to the Tavda, Tura, and Tobol Rivers into fur-rich western Siberia; it collected tribute from the western Siberian khanate. Since the 1380s Moscow had been expanding control among the Perm, Komi, Voguly, and Iugra peoples eastward to the Urals, vying with Kazan for control; the process was bloody and long, with much native resistance. In the 1460s to 1480s Moscow won control over most of the Perm peoples, conquering the key city of Khlynov (Viatka) in 1489. By the end of the fifteenth century most of Kazan's fur hinterlands—peoples in the Vychegda, Vym' Perm, and Perm Velikaia areas, the Voguly and Iugra as far northeast as the lower Ob, and some of the Samoyedic-speaking peoples on the White Sea littoral near the Pechora River— were paying tribute to Moscow, and doing it in luxury fur. Russia now controlled a vast, primarily Finno-Ugric forest hinterland, in addition to the East Slavic peasants of the center.
Because Kazan controlled the middle and lower Volga, Moscow sought overland routes for its sables, silver and black foxes, and ermines. For a valuable and all too brief period it found common cause with Kazan's rival, the Crimean khanate, forming an alliance around 1480. With Crimean aid, Moscow attacked the Grand Duchy and the Great Horde, culminating in a military standoff with the Great Horde on the Ugra River in 1480 that monkish chroniclers anachronistically heralded as Moscow's "liberation" from the Tatar control (which had, in reality, been over for decades). Anxious to subdue the Black Sea steppe, the Crimeans destroyed the Great Horde in 1502. Moscow and Crimea destabilized Kazan through dynastic intrigues: in 1487 Mengli Girey married Nur Sultan, widow of the khan of Kazan and mother of Mehmed Amin, whom Ivan III put on the Kazan throne soon thereafter. There ensued two decades of peace between Moscow, Kazan, and the Crimea.
The Moscow-Crimean alliance fell apart between about 1505-6 and 1512 when the Gireys sided with the Grand Duchy and commenced more than a century of intensive slave raiding and military campaigns into Muscovite lands. Moscow continued to meddle in dynastic succession in Kazan, creating a puppet Tatar principality at Kasimov in the late fifteenth century to groom a collateral line of the Kazan house for eventual usurpation of the throne. An equilibrium of sorts was established in the 1520s, when Safa-Girey took over the throne of Kazan and ruled in a way that satisfied Crimean and Muscovite interests. This balance lasted until his death in 1549, which opened a new era of Muscovite ambitions against Kazan.
From the late fifteenth century Moscow steadily pushed westward against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, aided by frequent shifting of allegiance of Orthodox princes on the border from the Grand Duchy to Moscow. Moscow's encroachments into the upper Oka area were ratified by a peace treaty around 1492, cemented by the marriage of Ivan III's daughter to Grand Duke of Lithuania Alexander in 1495. War broke out again in 1500, and by 1503 Moscow won Toropets and other upper Oka towns including Starodub, Briansk, Novgorod-Seversk, and
Chernigov (giving Moscow access to the Desna, a key tributary of the Dnieper). There ensued almost a century of non-stop wars between Moscow and the Grand Duchy.
Successes followed quickly. Moscow won the city republic of Pskov in 1510 and Smolensk in 1514, acquiring several overland trade routes: through Pskov to Narva and other Livonian towns on the Gulf of Finland and Baltic (in modern day Estonia and Latvia); through Toropets and Velikie Luki to Polotsk on the Western Dvina and on to Vilnius in the Grand Duchy; through Viaz'ma and Smolensk into the Grand Duchy. Mid-century brought Russia a major opening in the Baltic sphere. The Knights of the Livonian Order were the last remaining small principality on the shore of the Baltic, surrounded by large, ambitious states—Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, and Muscovy. Not only did it contain the most vibrant trade depots on the eastern Baltic (Narva, Reval, and Riga), but Livonia itself was fertile agrarian land, a producer of hemp, flax, grain, and other export goods. In 1557 the Livonian Knights, who had accepted Lutheranism in the 1520s, agreed to accept a vassal relationship with Poland, whereby some of Livonia would become a semi-independent duchy (Courland and Semigallia) and the rest a province in the Grand Duchy. Sweden, Denmark, and Russia immediately attacked Livonia, Poland, and the Grand Duchy. War raged for the next two decades, during which Poland and Lithuania formed a tighter political union in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (1569). Russia initially won Dorpat, Narva (1558), and Polotsk (1563), but quickly fell into a quagmire. Now the Grand Duchy's ally, the Crimean Tatars, ceaselessly raided the southern frontiers, while the domestic ravages of Ivan IVs Oprichnina (1564-72) further weakened Russia. When the dust settled, Russia was the biggest loser, ceding Estland (including Narva and Dorpat) and the Karelian shore of the Gulf of Finland to Sweden in the Treaty of Plussa in 1583 and Livonia and Polotsk to Poland-Lithuania by the Treaty of Iam Zapolskii in 1582. The devastation caused by Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish invasions was immense, causing massive peasant flight.
In the background of these dramatic ebbs and flows on the Baltic, Russia unexpectedly developed alternative access to European trade with the serendipitous arrival of English traders in 1553. The White Sea was not an unknown quantity to European traders; the Dutch had been trading offthe Kola Peninsula since the early sixteenth century. When Anthony Chancellor's ship landed on the White Sea coast (a companion ship had been stranded), he was in pursuit of a trade route to India. He arrived at an advantageous moment when Russia welcomed the European connection. Received well in Moscow, with promises of full trading rights for English merchants, Chancellor returned confidently to London, where the Muscovy Company was soon enfranchised (1555). In the same year Russia granted the new Company customs-free trade in Russia, with permission to maintain warehouses at Kholmogory, Vologda, and even Moscow. By 1557 English were purchasing rope walks in Kholmogory to produce the commodity they most desired for export. They also bought tallow, flax, wax, and other products essential to Britain's growing navy. The English enjoyed virtual monopoly of northern trade until 1581, when Russia lost Narva and could no longer afford to restrict European trade. Dutch merchants were allowed into White Sea trade and by the end of the century they had surpassed the British in volume. In 1584 Russia founded the port of Arkhangelsk directly on the shore (Kholmogory was some 75 km up the Northern Dvina) to facilitate trade. With shipping possible through the White Sea for a brief window every summer, Russia and its north European partners built Archangel into Russia's most active trading port by the end ofthe sixteenth century.