Ivan Kalita and the rise of Moscow

Ivan, the fourth son of Daniel, the first prince of Moscow, inherited the principality after his elder brother Yury was killed at the Horde in 1325 by Prince Dmitry of Tver; two chronicles, however, give Ivan eighteen years of rule in Moscow, which would place its start in 1322, when the khan took the grand principality from Yury. In August 1327 the people of Tver rose and killed the khan's kinsman Chol-khan and his men; Ivan went to Khan Özbeg and in the winter of 1327–1328 came back with the punitive army known as ‘Fedorchuk's host’, which laid waste the land of Tver, while Prince Alexander of Tver fled to Pskov. In 1328 the khan divided the grand principality, giving Ivan Kostroma and Novgorod and Vladimir to Alexander of Suzdal; after the latter's death in 1331 Ivan held all of it. Chroniclers of the next century wrote that his accession brought forty years of great peace, when the pagans ceased to make war on the Russian land.

Metropolitan Peter, who had sided with the Moscow princes against Tver, made Moscow his residence — by tradition in 1325 — and on his advice Ivan founded the stone Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin on 4 August 1326, the building the chronicler calls the first stone church of Moscow. Peter died in December 1326 and was buried in it, and in 1339 his successor Theognostus, a Greek who also lived in Moscow, had him canonized: Moscow became the seat of the head of the Russian Church. By 1333 four more stone churches stood in the Kremlin, among them the Archangel Cathedral, and in 1339–1340 Ivan surrounded it with new oak walls.

His methods were often harsh. In 1328 Muscovite officials plundered Rostov, and for years Ivan pressed Novgorod for extra payments, including the ‘silver from beyond the Kama’, after the tribute had been raised in the early 1330s — perhaps because the Horde needed money for its wars with the Ilkhanate, or because Ivan had promised more in return for the patent. Some historians believe Ivan was the first grand prince to collect the tribute in other principalities and deliver it to the khan himself; his grandson's will credits him with ‘purchases’ of Beloozero, Galich and Uglich, though what they meant is disputed. In 1339 Alexander of Tver and his son Fyodor were executed at the Horde, which ended the 35-year struggle between Moscow and Tver for supremacy (it flared up again only in the 1370s); the Novgorod chronicler blames Ivan as much as the khan. Ivan died on 31 March 1340; his nickname has been explained both by his generosity to the poor and by his thrift.