While the fifteenth century saw the expansion and consolidation of control over neighbors and within the ruling family, the sixteenth century was one of administrative organization and conquest of important non-Slavic trade centers. Ivan IV, ruled 1533-84, confounds historians with his "terribleness," epitomized by the Oprichnina (1564-72), a division of the realm, army, and elite that threw the state into turmoil, exacerbated by the failure of the long Livonian War (1558-81). When the dynasty died out with Ivan IVs son, Tsar Fedor Ivanovich (1584-98), the absence of customs of succession precipitated a political crisis that eventually turned into social crisis and foreign invasion as the great men and families of the realm (the "boyars") took more than a decade to agree on a legitimate ruler. Dubbed by historians "The Time of Troubles" (1598-1613, discussed herein and in Chapter 6), this era saw quick and often violent succession: Tsar Boris Godunov (a Muscovite boyar, 1598-1605), the first False Dmitrii (a pretender, 1605-6), Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii (a Muscovite boyar, 1606-10), Polish occupation of the Kremlin and negotiations with the Polish king and his son, Sigismund Vasa and Wladyslaw (1610-13). When the boyars agreed upon the Romanov family as the new dynasty, the state was soon able to restore stability.
Pursuing stability, the new Romanov dynasty maintained institutions of government (centralized bureaucracy, serfdom, tight control of resources), elites (boy- ars and landed cavalry) and aims (imperial expansion). It also modernized the army and economic growth and social change proceeded. The dominant culture and ideology remained based in Russian Orthodoxy, and through the seventeenth century cultural expression remained decidedly "medieval" in comparison to many of Russia's European neighbors. There was no production of secular art, writing, or science; religious art, architecture, hagiography, and history writing provided the modes of dominant cultural expression. Printing was rejected by Church and state; Russia was untouched by the turmoil of the sixteenth-century European Protestant Reformation, although echoes and influences of it did penetrate Russia by the late seventeenth century (as discussed in Chapter 13). But behind the facade of tradition, change occurred. The empire became, in this and the eighteenth century, increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews, and speakers of myriad languages including Ukrainian, Belarus'an, Tatar, Siberian native languages, Polish, and German. New European trends in art, architecture, and political thought penetrated from Ukraine.
Peter I (1672-1725) grew up in this setting of change that enabled the "reforms" for which he is most famous. In one generation he Europeanized his elites in culture, adopted a form of European "absolutist" political thinking, constructed an immense European-style army and navy, and restructured the institutions ofcentral government. He did this all in pursuit of Russia's enduring political goals— imperial expansion and mobilization of resources—and without forsaking the ruler's claim to autocratic power or abandoning Orthodoxy. Peter I made small but very significant territorial gains and cemented his newfound geopolitical prominence in central Europe by declaring himself "Emperor" and adopting the terminology of "Rossiia," rather than "Russia," to connote the empire's multiethnic space and imperial power. The eighteenth century saw tremendous economic growth and cultural change; ideas from Europe's many Enlightenments— German and French, cameralist and liberal, religious and secular—penetrated the small but increasingly vibrant Europeanized landed elite. Secular forms of cultural expression—portraiture, memoirs and odes, eventually stories and novels—became popular. Across the century scholars worked to create a more flexible literary language for Russian. Printing was embraced by state, Church, and society; Peter the Great founded the Academy of Sciences in 1724, staffed over the century by foreign and eventually Russian ethnographers, cartographers, philologists, historians, and other scientists. Catherine II (ruled 1762-96) epitomized the eighteenth- century Russian ruler—committed to autocracy and imperial expansion, resolute champion of Russian power in Europe and Eurasia, cameralist regarding governance and Enlightened regarding culture. A patron of satirical journals and theater, Catherine was herself an author of didactic plays. Her son Paul I (1796-1801) is renowned for rejecting his mother and her programs, but he did not divert Russia's essential paths of imperial expansion (west, south, and east), central control, and its enduring mixture of Europeanizing culture and Orthodoxy.
RUSSIA AND THE WORLD IN THE FIFTEENTH THROUGH SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
In this brief bird's-eye view of foreign policy through the seventeenth century, our goal is not to be comprehensive, as international politics even in these centuries before the arcane "balance of power" alliances of the eighteenth century could be dizzyingly complex. Rather, we will look for general trends. In the Muscovite centuries, Russia's abiding concerns were few: to earn a spot on the Baltic, which put it on a collision course with its rival to the west the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and (to a lesser extent in these centuries) with the waxing power of Sweden; to counter the raids of steppe nomads—Crimean Tatars, Great Horde, Nogais, and others; and to win the great trade emporium on the Middle Volga, Kazan, and its trade routes into Siberia and down the Volga.
To European and Eurasian neighbors, Russia was just beginning to appear of interest. In the fifteenth century central European powers had a limited understanding of the Moscow Grand Principality; travelers only began to visit and record their impressions in number in the late 1400s. In 1486 Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I sponsored a sort of reconnaissance visit by Nicholas Poppel to Russia; informed by Poppel that Ivan III was a substantive ruler, Maximilian sent him back in 1489 as an official ambassador. European rulers were interested in Russia for two purposes. The Holy Roman Empire sought Russia's help against both Poland- Lithuania and the Ottoman empire, while the Vatican was always eager for a religious union with Rome and/or an anti-Turkish crusade. Initiatives of this sort recurred through the sixteenth century.
Russia's first major engagement with European international politics came in 1472, when the Vatican proposed to Russia that Ivan III marry Zoe Paleologa, niece of the last Byzantine emperor. She had grown up in Rome as a ward of the Pope and may have been influenced in her Orthodoxy by Catholicism; the Vatican hoped for an anti-Turkish alliance and also some sort of religious union like the 1444 Florence-Ferrara Union that Russia had rejected. Ivan III accepted the match and the prestige and access to western technical expertise that it brought, but nothing came of the Vatican's higher hopes.
Ivan III's government itself initiated energetic international alliances against Poland-Lithuania. In the 1470s Russia began contact with the Moldovan principality, marrying Ivan III's son to the Hospodar's daughter in 1483; Ivan III entertained Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian's offer of an anti-Polish alliance but demurred because the Emperor attached too many strings. Perhaps Ivan III's most significant foreign alliance was with the Crimean khanate, which allied with Muscovy against Poland-Lithuania and the other major power on the steppe, the Great Horde, in 1480. While the Crimeans attacked the Grand Duchy, Russian forces met the Great Horde on the Ugra River, resulting in an anticlimactic standoff that contemporary church chroniclers hailed as a great defeat and later Russian historians declared to be the end of the "Mongol yoke." But the Qipchaq khanate had been imploding since the late 1300s and by the mid-fifteenth century not only had the Mongols' vast empire across Eurasia disintegrated into several major realms, including China, India, and Persia, but several splinter groups had emerged in the wake of the Qipchaq khanate (the Great Horde, Crimea, Siberia, Kazan). The Crimean khanate remained in alliance with Muscovy against Poland and its ally the Grand Duchy of Lithuania until 1513.