Moscow

Ivan I put the khan's tribute to work for his own city. The metropolitan of the Russian Church moved his seat from Vladimir to Moscow, and in 1326 the foundations were laid for the city's first stone church, the Dormition Cathedral, where the metropolitan chose to be buried, making Moscow the spiritual centre of Russian Orthodoxy. Under Dmitry Donskoy the oak palisade of the Kremlin gave way to walls of white limestone, and in 1380 he led a united Russian army to victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo, a battle that made the princes of Moscow the war leaders of all Rus'.

Ivan III, whose stand against the Tatars in 1480 is taken as the end of their overlordship, wanted a capital worthy of Constantinople, and brought architects from Renaissance Italy to rebuild the Kremlin; the new walls and towers designed by Pietro Antonio Solari were finished in 1495. As the seat of the tsars from 1547, the largely wooden city burned again and again, and in 1571 the Crimean Tatars set fire to everything outside the Kremlin. In 1610 Polish–Lithuanian troops occupied Moscow itself; two years later a militia led by Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky drove them out, and in 1613 an assembly in the city elected Michael Romanov tsar. A century on, in 1712, Peter the Great took his government away to Saint Petersburg.