The core of the Russian Empire was the small principality of Moscow, ruled over in the thirteenth century by a minor branch of the Rurikid dynasty.

This initially Viking dynasty had established itself in the East Slav lands in the ninth century. The senior Rurikid monarch had been the Great Prince of Kiev, but partible inheritance ensured that by the thirteenth century a multitude of small principalities existed, ruled over by the many branches of the Rurikid clan.

The position of the Rurikid princelings was transformed by the Mongol inva­sion of the thirteenth century. The conquerors allowed the northeastern princes, including those of Moscow, to survive as tribute-paying clients of the mighty Mongol Empire. This relationship survived for over 150 years, during which the princes of Moscow gradually emerged as the strongest and most trusted clients of the Mongols. Key final stages of Moscow's rise to domination of Great Russia were the conquest of the city-empire of Novgorod with its vast and rich northern territo­ries in the 1480s and the decision of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church to relocate to Moscow. From the late fifteenth century down to the empire's demise, the alliance between Russia's rulers and the Orthodox Church was a crucial ele­ment in the monarchy's legitimacy and identity. By 1500 the Muscovite realm was a consolidated nation in embryo, ruled over by a prince who had united all of Great Russia and whose subjects were overwhelmingly Great Russian in ethnicity and Orthodox in religion.²

Already by then, however, this realm had taken the first symbolic steps toward becoming an empire.

¹ Perrie 2006; Franklin and Shepard 1996.

² Halperin 1985; Ostrowski 1998 for two opposed views on the long-term Mongol impact on Russia.

Dominic Lieven, The Russian Empire (1453—1917) In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0035. appointed monarchs and protectors of the Orthodox community. There followed in the sixteenth century the first steps toward the acquisition of a territorial em­pire. Historians traditionally see the conquest of the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s as the decisive moment when an almost mono-ethnic realm began its transformation into a multiethnic empire ruling over not just a variety of peoples of different ethnicities and religions, but also over what had once been for­midable and effective states. Meanwhile, in the same era, the Russians were pushing forward into Siberia, initially in pursuit of its very profitable furs.^[2248]

This first great push toward empire occurred in the reign of Ivan IV (“The Terrible”) and over-reached itself, straining Russian resources beyond endurance and ending in disaster. The defeat of Russian efforts to seize the Baltic coastline from Sweden was followed by economic collapse. Almost simultaneously, the Muscovite dynasty died out and civil war erupted between claimants to the throne. This in turn unleashed anarchy in Russian society, as well as foreign invasion. The king of Poland's son was installed in Moscow as Russia's would-be ruler. There ensued a proto-national revolt which ended in the expulsion of the Poles, the election of Mikhail Romanov as tsar in 1613, and the reassertion of the old alliance between autocratic monarchy, the Orthodox Church, and the aristocracy, which was widely seen as the only basis for the preservation of social order and independent state­hood. This so-called Time of Troubles was very important in creating a number of memories and myths which underlay Russian politics until 1917. Any questioning of autocracy or of the legitimacy of the reigning dynasty was henceforth denounced as opening the floodgates to anarchy and foreign rule. The Romanov dynasty was legitimized as blessed by God and chosen by the Orthodox community to preserve it from both its inner demons and its external enemies.^[2249]