ABSTRACT
By the end of the fifteenth century a potentially great state, whose rise had profound implications for all of eastern and northern Europe, was emerging in the plains and forests of north-central Russia. Around the central nucleus of Moscow was now crystallizing, as the result of war and diplomacy, helped sometimes by duplicity and luck, a new political unit with immense possibilities of territorial expansion. This process had begun more than a century earlier; but the reign of the Great Prince (Velikii Knyaz) Ivan III of Moscow (1462–1505) saw it at its most rapid and successful. At his accession the hegemony of Moscow over the other Russian principalities was already in large part an established fact. But there were still many that were formally independent. Ryazan, Rostov, Tver and Yaroslavl, with the city republics of Pskov and Novgorod, though they were all threatened by the expansion of Moscow, owed it no formal allegiance. It was the essential achievement of Ivan, the most shadowy of all the major figures of the later Middle Ages, to bring most of these permanently under his control. In 1463 he began the absorption of Yaroslavl, a process that was completed over the following decade. In 1471 he set about the final destruction of the independence of Novgorod, with its enormous undeveloped territory stretching across north Russia as far as the Ural mountains. In that year he forced its ruling merchant oligarchy to agree to have no dealings with his enemies and (of great symbolic importance) that its archbishop should henceforth be consecrated in Moscow. Seven years later the city republic came under his direct control. Already in 1474 the ruler of Rostov had sold to Ivan his rights over the principality, while Tver was annexed in 1485. His son and heir, Vasily III, continued the process by ending the independence of Pskov in 1509 and of Ryazan around 1520.
