Ivan III: the first great tsar and one of the tragic

The Presidential Library has prepared rare materials in commemoration the birthday of the Russian Tsar Ivan III celebrated on January 22.

The Council of Christian Churches called by Pope Eugene IV and approved by the Byzantine emperor John VIII took place in Ferrara, Florence and Rome from 1438 to 1445. With the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Joseph II, the Council was attended by the Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia, the Greek Isidore, newly appointed by Joseph himself.

Political aim of the Council for the Vatican was to make Orthodox rulers return to Catholicism (and hence, to restore the protection of the Roman pontiff over their lands), and for the Byzantium - to get support from the Vatican (and, therefore, from the Catholic armies) in the struggle against the Turks. In July 1439, in Florence the coveted union was signed. However, already on his way to Moscow, Isidore saw misunderstanding and unrest of people because, according to S. Platonov in his "Lectures on Russian History" of 1917: "The Greeks themselves spend centuries to make the Russians hate Catholicism." Arriving in the capital, Isidore was taken into custody. Six months after the signing of the union, in the harsh winter of 1440, Prince Ivan was born.

The complex religious and political situation caused by the attempts of rapprochement between the two Christian religions, as well as fierce frosts of the new 1440 mentioned by the Nikon Chronicle, surrounded the birth and maturation of the Prince: the incessant strives (V. Klyuchevsky numbers 90 of them in the period from 1228 to 1462), border disputes with Poland and Kingdom of Livonia, permanent diplomatic clashes (payment of a tribute to the Horde Khan) and military clashes with the Horde. In 1445, after a crushing defeat in one of these clashes, wounded Ivan's father, Vasily II together with his many boyars and children were captured.

Panic fear of the Tatars’ invasion came over Moscow. Taking advantage of this fear, a nobleman Dmitry Shemyaka seized power. Dmitry, who had long cherished a plan of revenge for his brother, spread a rumor that Vasily was ready to give up Moscow to the Khan for freedom; as a result of the plot, Vasily II, who had been released by the Horde for ransom, was captured, imprisoned in the house of Shemyaka and blinded there by a groom called Berestenya. That was the atmosphere, in which the young prince, who had been his father's co-regent in his last years, was growing up.

March 28, 1462 Prince Ivan became the Grand Prince of Moscow and All Russia. According to Klyuchevsky’s lectures on "Russian History" issued in 1902 and available in the collections of the Presidential Library, Ivan III «continued the previous collecting of Russia’s territories, but not in the old way." "Not in the old way" meant that it was not necessary any more that the Prince of Moscow levied war or wove an intrigue in order to annex a new land, but it was often that the land itself in the person of its owners surrendered voluntarily to the Grand Prince.

It was the fact, for example, in 1463, when the princes of Yaroslavl came to him cap in hand. The same way Novgorod was conquered in 1470; Perm in 1472; in 1474 Rostov princes sold their remaining lands to Moscow; Tver joined Muscovy once and for all in 1485; Vyatka in 1489; in 1490s a number of princes came under the control of Muscovy. In general, during the reign of Ivan III, Muscovy increased almost twice. However, not only this was notable. The Great-Russian nation was part of the Moscow principality from the time of Dmitry Donskoy, but it was in the reign of Ivan III that it formed a state, that is the collection of lands becomes a national matter.

"Moscow was the general outpost for watching out the interests and dangers, equally familiar to the Muscovite, and a Tver inhabitant, and to every Russian," writes Klyuchevsky in his "Russian history." In connection with this change, the nature of foreign relations changed too: there were no more hostile principalities (or those having signed a peace agreement, but still sovereign), which had their particular ties, but a huge (more than twenty thousand square kilometers) national state having external relations with other powers.

First of all, the phenomenon of the national state reflected in the people’s concept about itself, its place. The reign of Ivan III accounted for the final separation from the Horde (which by the time represented in fact three warring Hordes) and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. As mentioned, the people did not accept the union with the Latins, so the Russian Orthodox tsar remained the only protector of the true faith – a "catholic tsar" (according to I. Zhdanov), while the Russian people was the only adherent of the Orthodoxy. 

It is not surprising then, that the elder Zosima, after the council of 1490, compared Ivan III with Constantine the Great, and called Moscow the "new Jerusalem." It will take quite some time, and the elder Felofey would openly and loudly announce Moscow the Third Rome.

An important step in the reign of Ivan III was a judicial reform and the adoption in 1497 of the Sudebnik – the national Code of laws. On the other hand, as a result of failure to appoint the Greeks on metropolitan chairs, there happened a dramatic rapprochement between the church power and secular authority - the first was actually a subordinate, or in conflict with the second. So, it was in the 15th century when the permanent debates regarding the church lands began (until the reign of Catherine the Great) as well the persecution of heretics (including those due to political reasons).

Klyuchevsky said in his lectures, "Moscow princes were <...> given the names of Ivan, Simon, another Ivan, Dimitri, Vasily, another Vasily. <...> All the princes of Moscow prior to Ivan III were similar to each other as two drops of water, so that the observer sometimes had difficulties to identify which of them was Ivan and which Vasily." Indeed, the era of Ivan III found its identity.

This identity, sometimes ugly and bloody, like the conquest of Novgorod, peers into the future through the eyes of the oprichnina, Malyuta Skuratov, toy army of Peter I, while sometimes, on the contrary, it looks at you through Peter's reforms (it was N, Karamzin in the "History of the Russian State" who compared Ivan III (the Great) with Peter the Great). 

This tragic contradiction would not temper its ardor further in the Russian history, rather the opposite; however, if before it began with the lack of understanding of itself, then it would continue as a kind of dispute with itself, which had been understood but not fully accepted.