Daniel’s forest appanage learned to tax for the khan
The Grand Principality of Moscow—Muscovy—grew from a thirteenth-century appanage into the leading Russian monarchy, capital at Moscow. Daniel (r. 1263–1303), youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, received the town; Ivan I (r. 1325–1340) won the grand-princely patent and collected Horde tribute for fellow princes.
Moscow began as a modest inheritance. When Alexander Nevsky's youngest son Daniel was handed the town and its hinterland, it became a principality of its own, and by the close of the thirteenth century it ranked with Tver as a leader inside the Grand Principality of Vladimir. The two rivals fought over the senior title after Mikhail of Tver took it in 1304. Daniel's son Yury won it from the khan of the Golden Horde, the princes' overlord, in 1318, only to lose it four years later.
The breakthrough came under Ivan I. Holding the grand-princely title, he gathered the khan's tribute from the other princes, and some of that money stuck to Moscow. The head of the Orthodox Church relocated there from Vladimir, making the city Russia's spiritual centre. Ivan crushed Tver and passed the title to his sons Simeon and Ivan II. It slipped away briefly, then Dmitry, who ruled from 1359 to 1389, fused the thrones of Vladimir and Moscow for good and beat the Tatars in 1380, a victory that lifted Moscow's standing enormously.
As Horde power ebbed, Vasily I enlarged the realm but still had to resume tribute after Tatar raids. Vasily II survived a civil war, and during his reign the Russian Church declared itself autocephalous in 1448, an independence the fall of Constantinople in 1453 effectively confirmed. Ivan III, reigning from 1462 to 1505, absorbed almost every other Russian state, annexed Novgorod in 1478 and defeated the Tatars in 1480, the conventional end of their overlordship and of the appanage era.
Titles rose with the territory. The old knyaz became veliky knyaz, grand prince, and in the fourteenth century Moscow's rulers began calling themselves rulers of all Russia. Ivan III took the title sovereign of all Russia, then autocrat, used tsar in foreign letters and declined a crown offered by the Holy Roman Emperor; tsar became official only in 1547. The name Moscow is first recorded under 1147, while the Greek-derived Rosiya entered secular royal titles after 1453.
Source: Grand Principality of Moscow
