Muscovite Claims to Rus Lands (1377–1700)

Abstract Muscovite princes like other medieval princes used the past to legitimize their policies. Their chroniclers traced Muscovy’s origins to the once metropole Kyiv according to the medieval logic of translatio imperii . After 1800, unlike their European counterparts, Russian historians did not dispense with medieval stories finally formulated by the mid 1500s, about their country. They still linked Moscow to Kyiv repeating an inherited tale about a supposed origins of “Russian history” to a non-Russian territory incorporated into their empire only in the late eighteenth century. They failed to separate the national from the imperial in their grand narrative of Russian history. This article reviews the evolution of Muscovites’ understanding of relations between Muscovy and Rus lands it did not control that historians of imperial Russia then adopted, rather than abandoned.