Most Powerful

• #1 Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible)
  Eurasian SteppeMuscovyRussia Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical Early Modern Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Ivan IV was the first Muscovite ruler formally crowned as tsar and one of the defining architects of Russian autocracy. His reign joined two different stories that are often told apart but belong together. One is the story of state-building: legal reform, military expansion, administrative growth, and the elevation of Moscow into a more self-conscious imperial center. The other is the story of terror: purges, mass violence, confiscation, and the oprichnina. To understand Ivan IV as a figure of wealth and power, both stories must be held at once.As ruler of Muscovy from childhood and crowned tsar in 1547, Ivan inherited a polity still marked by elite rivalry, frontier danger, and uncertain central reach. Early in his adult rule, he worked with advisers on reform, codification, and military strengthening. The conquests of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556 dramatically expanded Muscovite power along the Volga and altered the balance between the Russian state and the steppe. These victories enhanced the monarchy’s prestige and widened the strategic and fiscal horizon of the realm.Yet Ivan’s reign became increasingly defined by suspicion and coercion. The death of his wife Anastasia, setbacks in the Livonian War, fear of treason among boyars, and his own sharpened sense of sacred-autocratic mission all contributed to the brutal experiment of the oprichnina. In Ivan IV one sees a sovereign trying to make the state more absolute and in the same movement damaging the social foundations on which that state depended. His reign was formative precisely because it was both constructive and destructive.