rest of the century, awarding Russia control of territories brought by defecting
Orthodox princes (Novgorod Seversk, Chernigov, upper Oka) and cities won in
battle, including Smolensk and Briansk.
The eminent Habsburg diplomat, Sigismund von Herberstein, came to Moscow
in the 1520s to help negotiate these truces and to press Russia into anti-Turkish
and anti-Polish alliances, but Herberstein accomplished nothing formal. Similarly,
papal initiatives (in the late 1490s and the 1510s) failed to lure Russia into an anti-
Turkish crusade.
On the coveted Volga route, throughout the latefifteenth andfirst half of the
sixteenth century, Russia was intervening in dynastic politics in Kazan, as was the
Crimean khanate. When the Crimean khanate shifted its allegiance to the Grand
Duchy in 1513 (alarmed at Russia’s waxing power), it became a formidable foe in
raids on the southern frontier and a rival in Kazan politics. Ultimately, as detailed in
Chapter 3, Russia conquered Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556. It took the
next two centuries for Russia to push defensive lines into the steppe to control
nomadic raids along the Volga and from Bashkirs, Kalmyks, and Kazakhs on the
Caspian steppe. Meanwhile, from the 1580s Russian military units, often following
trappers, pushed across Siberia, reaching the Pacific by the end of the seventeenth
century.
Less successful in the time of Ivan IV was the Livonian War (1558–81), which
assembled major Baltic powers—Russia, Sweden, the Commonwealth of Poland-
Lithuania (created by a union of these two states, already dynastically allied, in
1569), Denmark—to contest for Livonia (approximately modern day Estonia and
Latvia). Home to the Livonian Knights, these Baltic coastal lands became vulner-
able territory in 1557 when the Knights secularized their Order and accepted the
suzerainty of Poland and the Grand Duchy. After early gains, Russia suffered
defeats at the hands of Sweden and Poland-Lithuania; Ivan IV was forced to
capitulate, requesting that the Vatican envoy, Jesuit Antonio Possevino, who had
been involved in negotiations with other combatants in the war, broker peace in
- Terms of the Treaty of Iam Zapolskii were harsh for Russia; it yielded all its
Livonian acquisitions and the Commonwealth won most of Livonia. In 1583 peace
followed with Sweden, which secured Estland (modern day Estonia) and the parts of
the Gulf of Finland coastline from Narva to Lake Ladoga that Russia had conquered.
Russia’s foreign policy in the sixteenth century was conscious and focused,
undermined only in the 1560s by the chaos of the Oprichnina. The seventeenth
century, however, started out with anything but controlled, intentional foreign
policy. The extinction of the dynasty in 1598 set Russia on the road to the Time of
Troubles. Polish private magnate armies invaded in 1604 in support of thefirst
“pretender”to the throne; the Polish king formally declared war in 1610 after Tsar
Vasilii Shuiskii (1606–10) accepted alliance with the Swedes, who sent in troops in - By the time the dust settled in 1613, Russia had lost territory to both.
By the Treaty of Stolbovo with Sweden in 1617, Russia ceded yet more territory
on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, but regained Novgorod and other
inland towns that the Swedes had occupied. It proved harder to reach a lasting
peace with the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. The Treaty of Deulino in
Prologue 13