Ivan the Terrible
He spent the last decade of his reign convinced that England's Queen Elizabeth I would marry him — and he was completely serious.
Ivan IV became Tsar of all Russia at age sixteen, which sounds like a recipe for disaster, except the first thirteen years of his rule were so competent that Russian historians later called the period a golden age. He reformed the legal code, established Russia's first printing press, created a standing army, and expanded the empire by roughly a million square miles. The man who would become synonymous with cruelty built his reputation first on something far more unsettling: genuine administrative talent.
The break came in 1560, when his wife Anastasia died. Ivan had loved her, genuinely and perhaps exclusively, and her death — which he blamed on poison administered by the boyar nobility — cracked something open in him that never healed. What followed was the Oprichnina, a parallel state-within-a-state that Ivan carved out of Russia in 1565, staffed by black-robed horsemen who carried severed dog heads on their saddles as symbols of their loyalty. He relocated himself to a fortified compound in Alexandrov and began terrorizing the country from a distance, inviting the terrified court to beg him to return. They did. He did. The killing accelerated.
But the England fixation is what history keeps stepping over. From the 1560s onward, Ivan maintained a peculiar obsession with an English alliance sealed by marriage — first to a relative of Elizabeth's, then to Elizabeth herself. He had already executed or tortured thousands of his own subjects. He had killed his own son with a blow from his iron-tipped staff in 1581. None of this prevented him from writing to Elizabeth in tones of wounded romantic sincerity, complaining that she governed like a common maiden aunt surrounded by merchants, when he had expected a proper sovereign. Elizabeth, for her part, kept the correspondence alive because the trade concessions through Arkhangelsk were too valuable to discard. She simply never answered the marriage questions directly.
He died in 1584 mid-game, playing chess. The board was found set up, the pieces scattered.
Ivan the Terrible kept a personal library of manuscripts so vast that scholars have been searching for it since the 17th century — the so-called Library of Ivan the Terrible may contain texts lost to the Western world since the fall of Constantinople, and no one has ever found it.
Why untold: Ivan's reign is filtered almost entirely through the lens of his violence, which is real and staggering, but that frame erases the political intelligence and bureaucratic modernization that made him one of the most consequential state-builders in Russian history — and one of the strangest diplomatic correspondents in Europe.
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— Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia (Yale University Press, 2005)
— Charles J. Halperin, Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
— Maureen Perrie, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume I: From Early Rus' to 1689 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)