Tsardom of Russia

The Tsardom of Russia, also known as the Tsardom of Muscovy, was the centralized Russian state from the assumption of the title of tsar by Ivan IV in 1547 until the foundation of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great in 1721. From 1550 to 1700, Russia grew by an average of per year. The period includes the upheavals of the transition from the Rurik to the Romanov dynasties, wars with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian conquest of Siberia, to the reign of Peter the Great, who took power in 1689 and transformed the tsardom into an empire. During the Great Northern War, he implemented substantial reforms and proclaimed the Russian Empire after victory over Sweden in 1721. Name While the oldest endonyms of the Grand Duchy of Moscow used in its documents were "Rus'" and the "Russian land", a new form of its name in Russian became common by the 15th century. The vernacular Rus was transformed into Rus(s)iya or Ros(s)iya (based on the Greek name for Rus'). In the 1480s, Russian state scribes Ivan Cherny and Mikhail Medovartsev mention Russia under the name (Rosia), and Medovartsev also mentions the sceptre "of Russian lordship". In the following century, the new forms co-existed with Rus' and appeared in an inscription on the western portal of the Transfiguration Cathedral of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery in Yaroslavl (1515), on the icon case of the Theotokos of Vladimir (1514), in the work by Maximus the Greek, the Russian Chronograph written by Dosifei Toporkov (died 1543 or 1544) in 1516–1522, and in other sources.