Chapter 7 explores the explosion of visual sources about Russia in the second half of the sixteenth century. Most notorious of them were the illustrated pamphlets about Ivan the Terrible’s attack on Livonia during the Baltic wars of the 1560s, where Ivan and his army were often depicted as hated Turks. An entirely different image of Muscovy was projected in costume books of the time, where the “typical dress” of Muscovite men and women resembled that of other Europeans, even if it was somewhat fanciful for lack of eyewitness knowledge. Finally, late sixteenth-century maps of Muscovy provide some illustration as well, often repurposing images from Herberstein’s account and costume books.

The Novgorod genocidal massacre of 1570 is one of the major events of the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584). It shows the tyranny of the tsar in terms of the 16th century and has been used in the historiography for 200 years to show how a tsar who had reigned for 20 years as a reformer could change and commit the most horrible crimes against his own people before turning back to his normal reign again. Supposing the Novgorodians were planning treason, the tsar and his army went secretly to Novgorod, shamed the Archbishop and began a massacre among the population as well as forcibly looted the town and its environments. The sources all tell the same story, as if they were from the same eyewitness. Also, contemporary sources appeared only in Western Europe from 1570 on, 17th ct. Russian sources betray a textual relationship to the Western sources so that the conclusion is that the Russian history of the Novgorod genocidal massacre derives rather from the Western than from native eyewitnesses’ descriptions.

After a fourteen-year boyar regency, Ivan the Terrible was crowned tsar and married to Anastasiia Romanova. In 1553 the tsar’s illness led to a succession crisis: some boyars hesitated to swear loyalty to his infant son. The birth of two more sons, Ivan and Fyodor, guaranteed an heir. As the oldest boy grew up, Tsar Ivan brought him to meetings with boyars and ambassadors, took him along for military campaigns, and had him married. The son’s untimely death left his younger brother the heir. Tsar Fyodor was incapable of effective rule and did not produce a son, leading to the election of his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, as his heir.