The Russian Empire, 1450–1801, by Nancy Shields Kollmann

The Russian empire is normally considered to have been instituted in 1721, when Peter the Great declared himself Emperor (imperator). Sometimes the start of the empire is back-dated to 1700, the outbreak of the Great Northern War, as it was Russia’s triumph in that war which inspired Peter to claim an imperial title. Some historians have dated the beginning of a Russian empire to 1552, when Muscovy conquered the Tatar khanate of Kazan, on the River Volga, partly justifying Ivan the Terrible’s adoption, on his coronation in 1547, of the title of tsar, which in Russian signified both Tatar khans and Byzantine emperors. Nancy Shields Kollmann, however, in this contribution to the ‘Oxford History of Early Modern Europe’ series, surprisingly dates the origins of the Russian empire to 1450 at the latest. Kollmann defines an empire as ‘a multinational and multi-confessional realm’ (p. 41), and argues that Moscow already ruled over an empire in this sense by 1450, since its subjects at around that date ‘comprised East Slavs, Finno-Ugric peoples, and some Turks, espousing Christian Orthodoxy, Islam and animist beliefs’ (p. 41). Kollmann here adopts a very capacious definition of an empire, since very few states in history have been entirely ethnically homogeneous.

Ancient history · Byzantine architecture · Emperor · Empire · Tatar · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Philosophy · Russia and Soviet political economy · Soviet and Russian History