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In 1378 Prince Dmitri refused to pay tribute to the Mongols, then raised an army of 150,000 and defeated the Golden Horde on the banks of the Don. Ivan III, known as Ivan the Great (1462-1505), carried this "gathering of the Russian land" to a new height when he took over Novgorod and its extensive territories to the northeast. He also attacked the Lithuanians and captured Smolensk and the Volga trading center of Tver.
Ivan saw himself as far more than a prince. He married Sophia Paleologus, a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, who had been killed in battle when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. Ivan thereupon laid claim to the title of Russian Emperor and took to calling himself a Czar, or ruler. He added to his family crest the two-headed eagle that had once stood for the Eastern Roman Empire. Muscovy's hereditary aristocrats, known as boyars, resisted Ivan's imperial pretensions, but the Russian clergy reassured him that he was personally descended from Augustus Caesar and that since Constantinople had fallen, Moscow was now "the Third Rome." Though the Mongols might once have punished such claims, their long-invincible empire was disintegrating. The Golden Horde dissolved into three different territories, the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Crimea.
The first two lasted only until the reign of Ivan's grandson, Ivan the Terrible (a term that in Russian means awesome rather than horrifying), who invaded Kazan in 1552 and routed all opposition. Ivan built Moscow's beautiful onion-domed St. Basil's Cathedral at the edge of Red Square to celebrate his victory, but he is mainly remembered for his pathological cruelty. Even as a boy, he liked to throw animals off the Kremlin's towers. "If hee misliked a face or person of any man whom hee met by the way," British Ambassador Sir Giles Fletcher reported on the young Czar, "hee would command his head to be strook off." Ivan had a paranoid suspicion that the boyars were scheming to overthrow him, and anyone he suspected, he killed. He not only liked to imagine new forms of torment (e.g., vertical impalement) but also liked to watch them being carried out.
Ivan killed his eldest son, apparently in a fit of rage, and so the throne passed to a second son, Fedor, who was mentally retarded and spent most of his time in prayer. The real ruler of Russia was Czar Fedor's brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, and when Fedor died childless in 1598, the dynasty that traced its origins back to the Varangian Rurik came to an end. An assembly of nobles elected Godunov Czar, but a rival faction in Poland began an insurrection. It was led by a youth known as the False Dmitri, who claimed to be the third son of Ivan the Terrible. Godunov had nearly defeated Dmitri's forces when he sickened and died. The False Dmitri ruled for a year, then was overthrown and executed. Sweden and Poland both laid claim to the throne and invaded. The Roman Catholic Poles even seized Moscow, but the Orthodox Church issued an appeal for the salvation of Holy Russia. A huge army soon gathered and expelled the invaders. In 1613 the victors then elected a new Czar to begin a new dynasty, the 16-year-old Michael Romanov.