Ivan the Terrible – Chinggis Khan’s or Augustus’s Descendant: Legitimization of the Supreme Authority of the Moscow Tsardom in Communication Practices of the 15th–16th centuries

• Main Author: Chernyshov S.A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: State Institution «Sh.Marjani Institute of History of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences» 2019-03-01
• Series: Zolotoordynskoe Obozrenie
• Online Access: http://goldhorde.ru/en/stati2019-1-9/

Research objective: To consider the communication practices of Ivan the Terrible, his predecessors, Russian diplomats and other representatives of the supreme power of the Moscow tsardom in the 15th–16th centuries in the context of the legitimization of rights to certain territories and ideas about historical continuity in general Research materials: The study was conducted on the basis of the analysis of the chronicles, charter and diplomatic materials, along with historical and ethnographic studies. Results and novelty of the research: The article “Historical Examples in the Letters of Ivan IV to the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde” (“Golden Horde Review”, 2018, no. 2) published by M.V. Moiseev, opens up broad opportunities for discussion about the positioning of the legitimacy of the supreme Moscow authorities in the period under consideration. The importance of this article is extremely difficult to overestimate since the scrupulous embedding of images and narratives of certain events in official documents is still rarely a separate research task. At the same time, having touched upon an important topic for Russian historiography, M.S. Moiseev leads the discussion in the direction of comparing the versions set forth in diplomatic or other official documents with the historical reality reconstructed with the use of other material. It is obvious that such a comparison would inevitably lead to the conclusion that the versions of events found in official documents are inconsistent – something which does, in fact, happen. More productive is the comparison of communication practices that the supreme Moscow authorities were developing with western, eastern and (no less important) intra-elite counterparties. The mention of that last group, in particular, makes it possible to take a fresh look at the thesis on the elite consensus on those or other versions of the annexation of the Volga region and the legitimization of the Moscow tsar. On the materials of diplomatic correspondence, chronicles, literary monuments and studies of historians, it is concluded that the positioning of the supreme Russian government differed significantly depending on the addressee’s relative position: in the west, east or inside the country. Starting to build a harmonious official version of the legitimization of the power of the Moscow tsar quite late, court intellectuals and Ivan the Terrible himself formulated at least three different full-fledged versions of the origins of the power of Moscow tsars from which they justified their right to occupy an important place among the Western and Eastern rulers: Augustus, Chinggis Khan and Christ.