Ivan's crown turned Moscow into a continental empire
Crowned tsar on 16 January 1547, Ivan IV launched a state that averaged about 35,000 square kilometers of growth yearly from 1550 to 1700. Kazan and Astrakhan fell; Siberia opened—until Peter the Great proclaimed an empire after beating Sweden in 1721.
The Tsardom of Russia—also called the Tsardom of Moscow—runs from Ivan IV's assumption of the tsar title in 1547 to Peter the Great's Russian Empire in 1721. Taking tsar, a Slavic form of Caesar, claimed parity with Byzantine emperors after Ivan III married Sophia Palaiologina in 1472 and imported double-eagle symbolism. Philotheus of Pskov argued in 1510 that fallen Constantinople left Moscow as the Third Rome. Ivan's nickname Grozny meant formidable and fear-inspiring, not merely cruel in the modern English sense of terrible.
Westerners long said Moscovia; Russians answered Rossiya. English visitors such as Giles Fletcher and Samuel Collins used Russia freely, while Polish–Lithuanian rivalry helped keep Moscovia alive in Catholic Europe. Richard Chancellor reached the White Sea in 1553 and helped found the Muscovy Company; Sigismund von Herberstein's 1549 commentary and later Adam Olearius opened the realm to European readers. Domestically, young Ivan endured boyar faction fights until his 1547 coronation, then issued a new law code, remade the army, and reorganized local government in the 1550s.
Territory roughly doubled from 2.8 to 5.4 million square kilometers between 1533 and 1584. Kazan fell in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, giving Moscow the Volga and a multiethnic, multiconfessional profile. The 1558 Livonian War dragged on twenty-five years against Poland–Lithuania, Sweden, and Denmark without securing the Baltic. Crimean raids under Devlet I Giray, sometimes with as many as 120,000 horsemen, hammered the Moscow region until Molodi; the Great Abatis Belt then soaked up tens of thousands of defenders each year. Peter seized power in 1689 and, after the Great Northern War, declared empire in 1721.
Source: Tsardom of Russia
