On January 25 (by some calendars, mid-January by the Julian dating used in Moscow), the young Grand Prince Ivan IV was formally crowned Tsar in an elaborate Byzantine-inspired ceremony, elevating Muscovy's ruler above mere princely status and asserting continuity with the fallen Roman and Byzantine empires. His fifty-year reign would expand Russia's borders enormously and, in its later years, descend into paranoid terror.
The coronation in the Cathedral of the Dormition inside the Kremlin was a deliberate piece of political theater. Metropolitan Macarius placed upon Ivan the Cap of Monomakh, a jeweled and fur-trimmed crown that Muscovite propagandists claimed had been passed down from Byzantine emperors, tying the new title of 'Tsar' — a Slavic rendering of 'Caesar' — to the prestige of Rome and Constantinople.
Ivan's early reign brought genuine reform: a new law code, the first Russian printing press, and territorial gains against the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. But the death of his beloved first wife and mounting paranoia about boyar treachery curdled him into the tyrant history remembers, culminating in the Oprichnina terror of the 1560s and 1570s, and, in a moment of rage in 1581, the killing of his own son and heir.
Key people: Ivan IV of Russia, Metropolitan Macarius