Muscovy (St. George's Night)

The Grand Principality of Muscovy was a large monarchy that spanned much of the former lands of the Kievan Rus and the Volga region. Devoutly Orthodox, it was for much of its history dedicated to "gathering the lands" of the former Kievan Rus and claiming dominion, as the "Third Rome", over all Orthodox Christians. It became the most powerful Rus' successor state, absorbing several neighbours, in the 1300s, then shot to power in the 1400s, overrunning Novgorod and throwing off the rule of the Golden Horde. In the 1500s, its expansion brought Muscovy into conflict with Lithuania and the Golden Horde's various successor states. Although it successfully expanded into the devastated Volga region, conquering the Nogai Horde and Astrakhan, and into Ukraine, its efforts to regain Smolensk embroiled it in a decades-long war with Lithuania, which undertook a sustained policy of alliance with Muscovy's Tatar neighbours that slowed its further expansion eastward. By the 1600s, the arrival of the Kalmyks in Siberia blocked further eastward expansion, and the Grand Princes' sustained policy of systematic oppression of the peasantry backfired as the Muscovite people's support for their state's grand mission dissipated.