To European and Eurasian neighbors, Russia was just beginning to appear of
interest. In thefifteenth century central European powers had a limited under-
standing of the Moscow Grand Principality; travelers only began to visit and record
their impressions in number in the late 1400s. In 1486 Holy Roman Emperor
Maximilian I sponsored a sort of reconnaissance visit by Nicholas Poppel to Russia;
informed by Poppel that Ivan III was a substantive ruler, Maximilian sent him back
in 1489 as an official ambassador. European rulers were interested in Russia for two
purposes. The Holy Roman Empire sought Russia’s help against both Poland-
Lithuania and the Ottoman empire, while the Vatican was always eager for a
religious union with Rome and/or an anti-Turkish crusade. Initiatives of this sort
recurred through the sixteenth century.
Russia’sfirst major engagement with European international politics came in
1472, when the Vatican proposed to Russia that Ivan III marry Zoe Paleologa,
niece of the last Byzantine emperor. She had grown up in Rome as a ward of the
Pope and may have been influenced in her Orthodoxy by Catholicism; the Vatican
hoped for an anti-Turkish alliance and also some sort of religious union like the
1444 Florence–Ferrara Union that Russia had rejected. Ivan III accepted the match
and the prestige and access to western technical expertise that it brought, but
nothing came of the Vatican’s higher hopes.
Ivan III’s government itself initiated energetic international alliances against
Poland-Lithuania. In the 1470s Russia began contact with the Moldovan princi-
pality, marrying Ivan III’s son to the Hospodar’s daughter in 1483; Ivan III
entertained Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian’s offer of an anti-Polish alliance
but demurred because the Emperor attached too many strings. Perhaps Ivan III’s
most significant foreign alliance was with the Crimean khanate, which allied with
Muscovy against Poland-Lithuania and the other major power on the steppe, the
Great Horde, in 1480. While the Crimeans attacked the Grand Duchy, Russian
forces met the Great Horde on the Ugra River, resulting in an anticlimactic stand-
off that contemporary church chroniclers hailed as a great defeat and later Russian
historians declared to be the end of the“Mongol yoke.”But the Qipchaq khanate
had been imploding since the late 1300s and by the mid-fifteenth century not only
had the Mongols’vast empire across Eurasia disintegrated into several major realms,
including China, India, and Persia, but several splinter groups had emerged in the
wake of the Qipchaq khanate (the Great Horde, Crimea, Siberia, Kazan). The
Crimean khanate remained in alliance with Muscovy against Poland and its ally the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania until 1513.
Ivan III’s diplomacy against Sweden did not work out well; he entered into an
alliance with Denmark against Sweden in 1496 that led into a brief and inconclu-
sive war. It was settled by a sixty-year armistice in 1508, helping Russia to focus on
the Baltic through the Grand Duchy. Conflict with the Grand Duchy was endem-
ic; in the 1480s and 1490s many Orthodox princesfled the Grand Duchy into
Muscovite service, bringing strategic border lands. Ivan III tried to establish peace
by marrying his daughter Elena in 1494 to Grand Duke Alexander (later king of
Poland 1501), but war nevertheless broke out from 1500 to 1503, and again in
- The armistice that halted hostilities in 1522 established the border for the
12 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801