Vologda

Vologda lay on the river of that name in the forest country of the north, where the water roads from the Upper Volga ran towards the Sukhona and the White Sea. It was a Novgorod frontier district, named in a treaty of 1264 and attacked in 1273 by Prince Svyatoslav of Tver; the oldest birch-bark letter found in the town dates from about 1320 to 1340. Its place at the crossing of rivers made it a prize in the wars between Novgorod, Tver and Moscow. Vasily I took it by force for Moscow in 1397, Prince Andrei the Lesser held it as his own appanage from 1462, and in 1481 it passed to Ivan III.

Under Ivan IV, Vologda became the hub of Russia's trade with England and Holland along the Sukhona and Northern Dvina. English merchants opened a trading house there in 1555. In 1565 the tsar chose Vologda as the capital of his oprichnina, ordered moats dug and laid out a stone kremlin meant to be twice the size of Moscow's. In 1568–70 the Cathedral of St Sophia went up, copied from the Dormition cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin. In 1571 Ivan stopped the work and left for good. In 1608 the town swore to the Second False Dmitry, then rose against his governor, and in 1612 the Muscovy Company moved its head office here. By the end of the seventeenth century only Moscow and Yaroslavl had more households.