Grand Principality of Moscow

At a glance

What was the Grand Principality of Moscow?

It was one of the principalities that emerged in north-eastern Rus' after the Mongol conquest of 1237–1240, and the one that eventually swallowed the others. In the language of its own time it was not a "grand duchy" at all. The Russian kniazhestvo means "principality", ruled by a kniaz' (prince); Western writers, who equated kniaz' with the Latin dux, called it a duchy, and later the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The Habsburg envoy Sigismund von Herberstein, who visited in 1517 and 1526, made the Latin name Moscovia familiar in Europe; his book called the ruler the "Grand Duke of Moscow, who holds the greatest part" of Russia.

Its people did not call themselves "Muscovites" as a nation. The historian A. A. Gorskii, in the Orthodox Encyclopaedia, notes that 15th-century sources speak of "the grand principality", "the grand principality of Moscow" and "the Moscow land", and that from the end of the 15th century a new name for the state appeared beside the traditional "Rus'": Rossiia, from the Byzantine Greek name for Rus'.

When was Moscow founded?

Moscow is older than the principality. The first written mention is in the Ipatian Chronicle under 1147, when Prince Yuri Dolgoruky of Rostov-Suzdal invited his ally Sviatoslav Olgovich: "come to me, brother, to Moscow". The princes feasted there on 4–5 April 1147. The Orthodox Encyclopaedia explains that the place, also known as Kuchkovo, already existed as part of Yuri's domain; 1147 is the year it enters the written record, not the year it was built. The first timber-and-earth fortress on the Borovitsky hill dates from 1156. On 20 January 1238 Batu's army took and burned the town; see our article on the Mongol invasion of Rus'.

The principality began a century later. Alexander Nevsky died in November 1263, and his youngest son Daniel, born in 1261, received Moscow. Since Daniel was about three years old, Moscow was governed for seven years, from 1264 to 1271, by the officials of his uncle Yaroslav Yaroslavich of Tver. Daniel only appears as an active ruler in the early 1280s. No charter records the grant, so "1263" is an inference from Alexander's death; "the 1260s" is the safest date. The story of Daniel's father is told in our article on Alexander Nevsky.

Who were the princes of Moscow?

Dates follow the Orthodox Encyclopaedia (articles by A. A. Gorskii and others). "Grand prince" here means grand prince of Vladimir, the senior title in north-eastern Rus', which the khan granted by patent.

During the civil war of 1425–1453 two rivals held Moscow for short periods: Vasily II's uncle Yuri Dmitrievich of Zvenigorod and Galich in 1433 and 1434, and Yuri's son Dmitry Shemyaka in 1446.

How did Moscow win the grand principality?

By the rules of the Rurikid family Moscow's princes had no claim to the senior throne of Vladimir. Gorskii points out that after Daniel's death in 1303, under both the old rule of seniority and the newer rule of inheritance from father to son, the Moscow line was excluded from it. Only the khan of the Golden Horde could change that, and Moscow's princes learned to win his favour.

Yuri Danilovich fought Mikhail of Tver for the patent. In 1305 Khan Toqta decided for Mikhail, but in 1317 Yuri married Khan Özbeg's sister Konchaka and received the patent. Mikhail was executed at the Horde in 1318; his son Dmitry killed Yuri there on 21 November 1325.

Ivan Kalita, Yuri's brother, turned the rivalry for good. When Tver rose against the khan's envoy on 15 August 1327, Ivan joined the Horde army that punished it in the winter of 1327–1328. In 1328 he was rewarded with half of the grand principality, Novgorod and Kostroma, while the other half went to Aleksandr Vasilyevich of Suzdal. The Nikon Chronicle says Ivan received the whole grand principality in 1328; the Orthodox Encyclopaedia follows other sources in which he gained the whole only in 1332, after Aleksandr's death, "thanks to gifts and the promise of large payments" to the Horde.

From then on, Moscow almost always held the patent. After Ivan, Simeon received from Özbeg in 1340, in the words of the Nikon Chronicle, "the Grand Principalities of Vladimir and Moscow". When the patent passed to Dmitry of Suzdal in 1360, Moscow's boyars won it back for the twelve-year-old Dmitry Ivanovich in 1362. Gorskii describes the next step: in 1383 Khan Tokhtamysh recognised the grand principality as the hereditary property, the otchina, of the house of Moscow. Dmitry Donskoy's will of 1389 then did what no will had done before: it left both Moscow and the grand principality of Vladimir to his son. "I bless my son, Prince Vasily, with my patrimony, the grand principality," it reads.

Who was Ivan Kalita?

Ivan I Danilovich (died 31 March 1340) is the prince most often credited with Moscow's rise. His nickname Kalita means a money bag or purse. The Orthodox Encyclopaedia notes that it appears in the sources from the end of the 14th century and has two explanations: one sees in it the thrift and meanness of the prince, the other his generosity, because he always carried a purse to give alms. A vision of 1407, recorded by the monk Paphnutius, places him in paradise for being "merciful and generous to the poor". The popular picture of a miser is therefore only one reading.

Ivan's achievements were concrete:

• The patent. He held the grand principality from 1328 (jointly) and 1332 (alone) until his death, the first Moscow prince to keep it for life.
• The Church. Metropolitan Peter often stayed with him in Moscow. Together they founded the first stone Dormition church in the Kremlin on 4 August 1326; Peter died on 20 December 1326 (the Nikon Chronicle gives the night of the 21st) and was buried in it, and the church was consecrated on 14 August 1327. Peter's successor Theognostus also settled in Moscow, and in 1339 Peter was canonised at Ivan's request.
• Land. By patent he gained half of the Rostov principality and probably Dmitrov; he also made "purchases" (kupli) of Galich, Uglich and Beloozero. Gorskii thinks he most probably bought the supreme rights of their princes, who then became his service princes.
• Money from Novgorod. To meet his promises to the Horde, he demanded a large sum from Novgorod, which led to a conflict in 1332–1333.

His two wills, written before journeys to the Horde, are the earliest princely testaments that survive in the original. V. A. Kuchkin dates them to 1336 and 1339; the 1813 edition dated the first to 1328. They divide Moscow among his three sons and show how the principality was run: revenue districts were given to boyars "in kormlenie", to "feed" on, keeping part of the income.

Why did Moscow become the centre of Russia?

Historians have offered several explanations, and most now combine them.

1. Geography. The 19th-century historian Vasily Klyuchevsky called Moscow a "nodal point" (uzlovoi punkt): its river, through the Istra and a short portage to the Lama, connected the Oka basin with the upper Volga, and settlers and boyars from other lands moved to the safer forests of the centre.
2. The khan's favour. Moscow's princes served the Horde loyally when it mattered, in 1317, 1327 and 1383, and as grand princes they answered to the khan for the tribute of north-eastern Rus'.
3. The Church. With the metropolitan in Moscow from the 1320s, the city became the religious capital of Rus'. The Nikon Chronicle says that other princes "did not find it very sweet" that Moscow became the metropolitan's seat. In 1448 the Russian bishops elected Iona as metropolitan without Constantinople, which made the Church in Moscow independent in practice. Monasteries founded under Moscow's protection, such as Sergius of Radonezh's Trinity monastery, spread its influence.
4. Acquisitions. Moscow grew by conquest, purchase, inheritance and the khan's grants: Kolomna and Mozhaisk around 1300, Pereslavl in 1302, Kalita's "purchases", Nizhny Novgorod in 1392. Gorskii's book on the subject is called From Lands to Grand Principalities: the "Additions" of the Russian Princes.
5. A single line. The Moscow house had few branches and, from Donskoy on, passed the throne from father to son. Ivan III went further and stopped sharing new lands with his brothers.

What happened under Dmitry Donskoy?

Dmitry Ivanovich (1350–1389) came to the throne as a boy of nine and spent his reign at war. In the winter of 1366/67 Moscow decided to build a stone fortress, and in 1367 the white-stone Kremlin was founded. It held off the Lithuanian grand duke Algirdas, who attacked Moscow in 1368, 1370 and 1372 and at last recognised the grand principality as Dmitry's otchina. Mikhail of Tver, who had obtained a patent from Mamai in 1371, was besieged in 1375 and had to accept the status of Dmitry's "younger brother".

From 1374 Dmitry was at war with Mamai, the ruler of the western Horde. His army beat a Horde force on the Vozha in 1378 and defeated Mamai himself at Kulikovo on 8 September 1380, which gave Dmitry his later name "Donskoy" (of the Don). Two years later Khan Tokhtamysh took Moscow by deceit and burned it, in August 1382, and in 1383 Dmitry had to send his son Vasily to the Horde as a hostage. See our articles on the Battle of Kulikovo and Tokhtamysh.

Dmitry's will of 1389 shows what had changed. Besides leaving the grand principality to his son, it looked forward to the end of Tatar rule: "if God changes the Horde, my children shall not pay the tribute to the Horde".

What was the great civil war of 1425–1453?

When Vasily I died on 27 February 1425, his son Vasily II was ten years old. Vasily I had prepared the succession carefully, with the support of the metropolitan, of his father-in-law Vytautas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and of the khan. But his brother Yuri Dmitrievich of Zvenigorod and Galich claimed the throne under the old rule that a brother came before a son.

In 1431–1432 both sides argued their case before Khan Ulugh Muhammad, who decided for Vasily. Yuri seized Moscow twice, in 1433 and 1434, and died in 1434. His son Vasily Kosoy was defeated, captured and blinded on 14 May 1436. On 7 July 1445 Vasily II himself was beaten near Suzdal by the sons of Ulugh Muhammad and taken prisoner; he was released on 1 October for a huge ransom. Early in 1446 Yuri's other son, Dmitry Shemyaka, seized Moscow, and on 16 February 1446 Vasily II was blinded at Shemyaka's court in the Kremlin, which gave him his name, "the Dark". His supporters took Moscow back at the end of the year, and Shemyaka was poisoned in Novgorod in 1453, on Vasily's orders.

The war ended the old idea that the throne passed among brothers. From now on it went from father to son, and the appanage princes of the Moscow house lost their independence.

What did Ivan III achieve?

Ivan III (ruled 1462–1505) turned the principality into a state. Gorskii's summary is that under him Moscow's ruler became "sovereign and grand prince of all Rus'", a title that claimed every Russian land, including those held by Lithuania.

Gathering the lands. Novgorod, defeated on the Shelon on 14 July 1471, surrendered in January 1478 and lost its assembly and its independence. Tver, Moscow's old rival, surrendered on 12 September 1485 after its last grand prince fled to Lithuania; the story is told in our Tver entry. Wars with Lithuania in 1487–1494 and 1500–1503 brought the Chernigov–Seversk lands and Vyazma.

Sophia Palaiologina. On 12 November 1472 Ivan married Zoe (Sophia) Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, who had grown up in Rome. According to the Nikon Chronicle she entered Moscow that day, and Metropolitan Philip married them in a temporary wooden church inside the unfinished cathedral.

The Kremlin. When the new Dormition cathedral collapsed while still unfinished on 20 May 1474, Ivan sent for an Italian. The Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti arrived on Easter Sunday, 26 March 1475, and the cathedral was consecrated on 12 August 1479. Italian masters then rebuilt the Kremlin in brick. According to the Nikon Chronicle, on 19 July 1485 "Antonio the Italian" laid the foundation of a gun tower with a secret passage on the Moscow River; UNESCO dates the present walls and towers to 1485–1516 and the Palace of Facets to 1487–1491.

Law and government. In 1497 Ivan issued the Sudebnik, the first law code for the whole state, which also limited the right of peasants to leave their lords to the period around St George's Day in autumn. A council of boyars (the Boyar Duma) and a staff of secretaries (d'iaki) took shape. Ivan gave confiscated Novgorod land to his servitors as pomest'e, land held for service that the holder could not sell or bequeath; Donald Ostrowski notes that the word first appears in a chronicle entry for 1484.

How did Moscow break free from the Horde?

There was no single moment. Vasily I stopped paying tribute for years under the emir Edigu, who besieged Moscow in December 1408 and left with a ransom of 3,000 roubles. In 1472 Khan Ahmad of the Great Horde marched on Moscow, reached Aleksin on the Oka at the end of July and withdrew; Gorskii writes that Ivan III then stopped paying the tribute.

In 1480 Ahmad tried to restore his authority. He set out in the summer of 1480, allied with Lithuania, and on the Ugra, a tributary of the Oka on the border between Moscow's and Lithuania's lands, the two armies faced each other for about two months. In early November the khan withdrew. Russian tradition later called this the "Stand on the Ugra" and saw it as the end of the "Tatar yoke". Gorskii describes it as a failed attempt to restore the khan's supremacy, after which the Great Horde could no longer threaten Moscow. A study of 2019 in the Golden Horde Review adds that Moscow went on making payments to the Tatar successor khanates, so its dependence did not simply end on the Ugra. The Great Horde itself was destroyed by Moscow's ally Mengli Giray of Crimea in June 1502; see our Golden Horde entry.

Did the Grand Duchy of Moscow have a flag?

No national flag of the Grand Principality of Moscow is known. Images offered online as its flag are modern reconstructions. What the state did have were emblems on its rulers' seals.

The best evidence for the state's symbols is its seals. According to the historians Kamentseva and Ustiugov (1974), from Vasily I onwards the seals of the Moscow grand princes show a horseman with a spear or sword; Ivan III's seals show a horseman striking a serpent. Kamentseva and Ustiugov note that the reading of this rider as St George first came from foreign visitors in the 17th century. The double-headed eagle, which became the arms of Russia, first appears with a firm date on a seal attached to a charter of 1497, Ivan III's exchange charter with his nephews, the princes of Volok: the horseman on one side, a crowned double-headed eagle on the other. Gorskii writes that the double-headed eagle became the state emblem in the 1490s.

The popular story that the eagle came to Moscow with Sophia Palaiologina in 1472 does not fit the dates well: the first dated use is a quarter of a century later. Kamentseva and Ustiugov linked the emblem to Moscow's claim to the Byzantine succession.

Was Moscow the "Third Rome"?

The famous phrase comes from a letter by Filofei, a monk of Pskov, written to the grand prince's official Misiur Munekhin. Its editor, V. V. Kolesov, dates it to the end of 1523 or early 1524. Filofei argued that all Christian kingdoms had come together in the realm of the grand prince: "two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be". Elsewhere in his letters he explained that the church of old Rome had fallen through heresy, while in the second Rome, Constantinople, the descendants of Hagar, the Turks, had cut down the church doors with axes.

The historian Marshall Poe (1997) showed that the idea was not an official state doctrine. Filofei was a churchman urging the prince to protect the Church; the idea had "no official status and was probably unknown to the secular elite that ruled the Muscovite state"; it survived later mainly in Old Believer writings and was rediscovered only when the letters were first published in the 1860s. It was late-19th-century historians who turned it into the supposed ideology of Muscovite imperialism.

How large was Moscow and its state?

There are no reliable figures. The Soviet Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives the territory of the Russian state as 430,000 km² in the early 1460s and 2.8 million km² by the 1530s, but it does not say how these figures were obtained. The map on this site gives a different area, calculated from its border data. Neither figure should be treated as a measurement.

For the city, Herberstein reported in 1549 that, six years before his visit, "the houses were counted by an order of the prince, and that the number exceeded 41,500", which he himself found "scarcely credible". He described Moscow as "entirely a city of wood", so broad and dirty that bridges had been built over the streets.

How did the Grand Principality end?

Ivan III's son Vasily III (1505–1533) completed the gathering of the lands. The Pskov Republic lost its independence in 1510, Smolensk was taken from Lithuania in the summer of 1514, and around 1521 the last grand prince of Ryazan fled to Lithuania. When Vasily died on 3 December 1533, his son Ivan IV was three years old. On 16 January 1547 Ivan was crowned tsar in the Dormition cathedral, and the Grand Principality of Moscow continued as the Tsardom of Russia.

How do historians explain Moscow's rise?

The question has been argued for two centuries.

• The "gathering of the Russian lands". 19th-century historians such as Sergei Solovyov and Vasily Klyuchevsky told the story as the steady unification of Russia around Moscow, driven by geography, thrifty princes and the Church.
• The Horde's role. Later historians stressed how much Moscow owed to the khans' patents. Donald Ostrowski (Muscovy and the Mongols, 1998) argued that Muscovy adapted political institutions from the steppe, for example that the Boyar Council followed the model of the khan's council of four leading emirs; Charles Halperin disputed this, and the two have debated it in print.
• Accident and choice. Gorskii's research emphasises the specific decisions of khans and princes, such as the patents of 1317, 1328/1332 and 1383, rather than any inevitable process.

Common myths about the Grand Principality of Moscow

Timeline of the Grand Principality of Moscow

What the map shows next

The border data draws the principality from 1294 to 1546; its beginnings in the 1260s fall before the map's first drawing. At 1340 on the map it is a compact principality on the Moscow River beside Tver, under the shadow of the Golden Horde. At 1420 on the map it reaches the Volga at Nizhny Novgorod, and by 1500 on the map it has absorbed Novgorod and Tver and reaches from the Arctic forests to the steppe frontier. After 1547 the map continues it as the Tsardom of Russia, which conquered Kazan in 1552.