page_title: Ivan III of Russia
section_title: Foreign policy
hierarchical_section_title: Ivan III of Russia / Foreign policy
context_page_description: Ivan III Vasilyevich, also known as Ivan the Great, was a Grand Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of all Rus'. Ivan served as the co-ruler and regent for his blind father Vasily II from the mid-1450s before he officially ascended the throne in 1462.
  Sometimes referred to as the "gatherer of the Russian lands", he tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Mongols/Tatars over Russia, renovated the Moscow Kremlin, introduced a new legal codex and laid the foundations of the Russian state. His 1480 victory over the Great Horde is cited as the restoration of Russian independence 240 years after the fall of Kiev to Mongols' invasion.
  Ivan was the first Russian ruler to style himself "tsar", albeit not as an official title. Through marriage to Sofia Paleologue, he made the double-headed eagle Russia's coat of arms and adopted the idea of Moscow as Third Rome. His 43-year reign was one of the longest in Russian history, second only to his grandson Ivan IV.
context_section_description: Muscovy rejected the Tatar yoke during the reign of Ivan III. In 1476, Ivan refused to pay the customary tribute to the grand Khan Ahmed, and in 1480 Ahmed Khan organized a military campaign against Muscovy.  Throughout the autumn the Muscovy and Tatar hosts confronted each other on opposite sides of the Ugra River, till 11 November 1480 when Ahmed retreated into the steppe.
  In the following year the Grand Khan, while preparing a second expedition against Moscow, was suddenly attacked, routed and slain by Ivak, the Khan of the Nogay Horde, whereupon the Golden Horde suddenly fell to pieces. In 1487 Ivan reduced the khanate of Kazan, one of the offshoots of the Horde, to the condition of a vassal-state, though in his later years it broke away from his suzerainty. With the other Muslim powers, the Khan of the Crimean Khanate and the sultans of Ottoman Empire, Ivan's relations were peaceful and even amicable. The Crimean Khan, Meñli I Giray, helped him against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and facilitated the opening of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Constantinople, where the first Muscovian embassy appeared in 1495.
  The Christian rulers in the Caucasus began to see the Muscovite monarchs as their natural allies against the Muslim regional powers. The first attempt at forging an alliance was made by Alexander I, king of a small Georgian kingdom of Kakheti, who dispatched two embassies, in 1483 and 1491, to Moscow. However, as the Muscovites were still too far from the Caucasus, neither of these missions had any effect on the course of events in the region. In 1488, Ivan sought gun-founders, master-gunners for siege cannons, gold- and silversmiths and (Italian) master builders from Matthias Corvinus of Hungary.
  In Nordic affairs, Ivan III concluded an offensive alliance with Hans of Denmark and maintained regular correspondence with Emperor Maximilian I, who called him a "brother". He built a strong citadel in Ingria, named Ivangorod after himself, situated on the Russian-Estonian border, opposite the fortress of Narva held by the Livonian Confederation. In the Russo-Swedish War (1495–1497) Ivan III unsuccessfully attempted to conquer Viborg from Sweden, but this attempt was checked by the Swedish garrison in Viborg Castle led by Lord Knut Posse.
  The further extension of the Moscow dominion was facilitated by the death of Casimir IV in 1492, when Poland and Lithuania once again parted company. The throne of Lithuania was now occupied by Casimir's son Alexander, a weak and lethargic prince so incapable of defending his possessions against the persistent attacks of the Muscovites that he attempted to save them by a matrimonial compact, wedding Helena, Ivan's daughter. But the clear determination of Ivan to appropriate as much of Lithuania as possible finally compelled Alexander to take up arms against his father-in-law in 1499. The Lithuanians were routed at the Battle of Vedrosha on 14 July 1500, and in 1503 Alexander was glad to purchase peace by ceding to Ivan Chernigov, Starodub, Novgorod-Seversky and sixteen other towns.
caption: Ivan III tearing the khan's letter to pieces, an apocryphal 19th-century painting by Aleksey Kivshenko.
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