Welcome to the Russian rulers podcast. I'm your host Mark Schaus.

Episode 11, Ivan the Great, Part 2.

In last week's episode, we saw how Ivan the Great crushed Novgorod and replaced the elite

voyeurs with Muscovite loyalists.

This was only the beginning of Ivan's gathering of the lands of Russia. The staggering growth and speed of growth was as great as any in human history.

The Romans, Chinese, Persians, to name a few, all grew to enormous proportions in their history, but Ivan did it in record-breaking time.

His expansion went north to Trier, and Novgorod all the way to the banks of the White Sea. When he took control of

Novgorod he kept one half of the land for himself, giving the rest to 2,000 of

his people, some of them loyalists from

Mavgarod, the rest from Moscow.

What he did was to copy the late Roman Byzantine

Pronoyah system, whereby land was released by the state to a loyal subject in return for service to the state.

This land was heritable from father to son, as long as the son continued in service to the state and ruler.

The institution was known to the Russians as Pomesti.

Ivan would

serve in the I would have even field an army four times as large as his father Vassili the blind.

Furthermore, Pomesti was an institution that molded the Russian landscape until the revolution 440 years later.

Ivan expanded east to the frontier of the Conate of Siberia.

He went west to the Ugra and Desna rivers. To to the southeast taking then Lithuanian towns of Priensk and

Chernagof.

Soon he extended his lands just short of Kiev. As for military power, he annexed one prince's private army

after another and to his ever-growing military force, his armed forces, made him the

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