IN 1553, wool-merchant Richard Chancellor found a passage from England to Archangel around northern Scandinavia, bypassing the jealous nations of the Hanseatic League that controlled Baltic trade.* Ivan’s grandson Ivan IV,* who also felt trapped by the League, was as delighted as Chancellor himself, and sent him home with letters for King Edward VI offering his new English friends favoured status as a trading partner.
Unfortunately, Ivan IV’s reign was followed by a succession crisis, the Time of Troubles,* and the instability broke the fledgling partnership with England. But the first of the Romanovs, Michael I, steadied the State; and during a historic European tour* his grandson Peter visited London, Oxford and Manchester in 1698 to research urban design for his new city on the River Neva, St Petersburg. In 1732 it became Russia’s capital — an Imperial capital, for Tsar Peter had declared himself Emperor in 1721.
See Merchants of Muscovy.
Ivan IV reigned as Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547, and as Tsar of All the Russias from 1547 to his death in 1584. ‘All the Russias’ meant ‘all the states of the Rus’ people’. The title had in fact been used by his grandfather Ivan III, but Ivan IV was the first to adopt it officially. History has named him Ivan ‘the Terrible’, in the sense of awe-inspiringly magnificent. Compare Psalm 47:2.
See Dmitry the Pretender.
See The Grand Embassy.