Early Life
Ivan was the son of Vasili III and his second wife, Elena Glinskaya. When Ivan was three years old, his father died from a boil and inflammation on his leg which developed into blood poisoning. Ivan was proclaimed the Grand Prince of Moscow at his father's request. At first, his mother Elena Glinskaya acted as regent, but she died of what many believe to be assassination by poison when Ivan was only eight years old. According to his own letters, Ivan, along with his younger brother Yuri, often felt neglected and offended by the mighty boyars from the Shuisky and Belsky families.
Ivan was crowned with Monomakh's Cap at the Cathedral of the Dormition at age 16 on 16 January 1547. He was the first person to be crowned as "Tsar of All the Russias", hence, claiming the ancestry of Kievan Rus. Prior to that, rulers of Muscovy were crowned as Grand Princes, although Ivan III the Great, his grandfather, styled himself "tsar" in his correspondence.
By being crowned Tsar, Ivan was sending a message to the world and to Russia: he was now the one and only supreme ruler of the country, and his will was not to be questioned. "The new title symbolized an assumption of powers equivalent and parallel to those held by former Byzantine Emperor and the Tatar Khan, both known in Russian sources as Tsar. The political effect was to elevate Ivan's position." The new title not only secured the throne, but it also granted Ivan a new dimension of power, one intimately tied to religion. He was now a "divine" leader appointed to enact God's will, "church texts described Old Testament kings as 'Tsars' and Christ as the Heavenly Tsar." The newly appointed title was then passed on from generation to generation, "succeeding Muscovite rulers...benefited from the divine nature of the power of the Russian monarch...crystallized during Ivan's reign."
Read more about this topic: Ivan The Terrible
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