IVAN III (MUSCOVY) (1440–1505; ruled 1462–1505)

IVAN III (MUSCOVY) (1440–1505; ruled 1462–1505), grand prince of Muscovy. Ivan III Vasil'evich grew up during the dynastic civil war of his father's reign and went on to lay the foundations of Russian statehood and ethnographic territory.

After ascending the throne in 1462, Ivan expanded the territory of the Grand Principality of Moscow by annexing the small but crucial principalities of Yaroslavl' (1463), Rostov (1474), Tver' (1485), Vyatka (1489), and most importantly, the Novgorod republic (1478). Exploiting internal rivalries among the ruling elite of Novgorod, Ivan was able to annex it without serious fighting. He thus acquired the main Russian emporium for the Hanseatic League and the vast Russian north, rich in furs, salt, and forest products. Defections to Moscow of Russian princes on the Lithuanian border led to two wars (1487–1494 and 1501–1503) and the addition of Chernigov (Chernihiv), Novgorod-Seversk, and Byansk to Moscow. In 1480 Ivan's army confronted the Great Horde, a successor state to the Golden Horde, but the Horde retreated without a battle. The event provided a symbolic end to the supremacy of the heirs of the Mongols, by now weakened by internal feuds. After the death of his first wife, Maria of Tver', Ivan married Sofiia Paleologue, a Byzantine princess living in Rome. The 1472 marriage, encouraged by the Venetian Pope Paul II, brought new prestige to Moscow and, in Sofiia, a powerful figure to its court, where she remained until her death in 1503.

Ivan's policy rested on new state institutions that evolved from the princely household. Foremost in importance was the duma, the council of some ten or twelve men of the great aristocratic clans who ruled with the prince. The center of administration was the treasury, headed by a boyar from the Greek Khovrin family of the Crimea and comprising half a dozen secretaries and lesser staff. It not only kept and recorded revenues but acted as an archive of treaties, charters, and foreign policy, whose administration it handled. The court was headed by the majordomo, who managed Ivan's household as well as taking on larger judicial functions. These aristocrats worked well with Ivan until the 1490s, when the death of his eldest son occasioned a succession crisis. At first Ivan favored his grandson Dmitrii, who was even crowned in 1498. Almost immediately, however, Dmitrii fell from favor, and Ivan chose in his place Vasilii, his second son by Sofiia. As a result the greatest of the boyars, the princes Patrikeev, went into exile.

Under Ivan the army came to rest less on the retinues of the great aristocrats than on the new gentry cavalry, each given a pomest'e, a land grant conditional on military service. Lands confiscated in the 1490s from the old Novgorod nobility formed a large part of these grants. The law code of 1497 began the process of writing down Muscovite law, although it was still more of a procedural handbook for judges than a code.

Ivan's reign coincided with a period of ferment in the church. Autocephalous since 1448, the Russian Orthodox Church maintained correct, if strained, relations with the Greeks. The first challenge to its authority came from a small group of Novgorod clergy and Moscow lay officials called "Judaizers" by their opponents. They seem to have questioned monastic institutions, the devotion to icons, and some aspects of trinitarian doctrine. After some hesitation from Ivan, they were condemned and executed in 1504–1505. Their principal opponent, the abbot Joseph of Volokolamsk, was a staunch proponent of traditional monasticism and, after Ivan rejected the heretics, of princely power as well. At the same time the hermit Nil Sorskii advocated a more individual monastic piety and rejected the punishment of the heretics.

Ivan was the motivating force behind the construction of one of Russia's greatest architectural achievements, the Moscow Kremlin as we see it today. Almost entirely the work of Italian architects, the new building began with Aristotele Fioravanti's Dormition Cathedral (1475–1479), followed by the work of the Milanese Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solari, who built the Kremlin walls (1485–1495) in imitation of the Sforza castle in Milan. At the same time they constructed the princely palace, of which the Faceted Palace (1487–1491) still remains. Russian architects from Pskov built the Annunciation Cathedral as the palace church (1484–1489).

The new palace, churches, and fortifications reflected the Moscow principality's new position in the world. During these years the usage Rossiia ('Russia'), reflecting Greek antecedents, began to replace the older "Rus"' and to refer to the lands under Ivan's rule. Informal usage of the term "tsar" appears in some documents. Ivan III, more than any other ruler, laid the foundations for the later Russian state.

See also Duma ; Ivan IV, "the Terrible" (Russia) ; Russia ; Russia, Architecture in ; Russia, Art in ; Vasilii III (Muscovy) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alef, Gustave. The Origins of Muscovite Autocracy: The Age of Ivan III. Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 39. Berlin, 1986.

Fennell, J. L. I. Ivan the Great of Moscow. London, 1963.

Soloviev, Sergei M. History of Russia. Vol. 7, The Reign of Ivan III the Great. Translated by John D. Windhausen. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1978. Vol. 8, Russian Society in the Age of Ivan III. Translated by John D. Windhausen. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1979.

Paul Bushkovitch