Ivan the Terrible

16 January 1547, Dormition Cathedral

On 16 January 1547, in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, Metropolitan Macarius conducted the formal coronation of the sixteen-year-old Ivan IV as tsar.

A surviving coronation order regulates his installation and proclamation and the transfer to him of the symbols of tsarist authority.

The date is the Julian one then used in Muscovy. The Presidential Library renders its modern Gregorian equivalent as 26 January.

Four pieces of regalia, then the chrismation

Macarius invested Ivan with a cross, a gold chain, the barmas — a ceremonial shoulder collar — and the Cap of Monomakh. Chrismation gave the ceremony an explicitly sacred character.

Ivan and Macarius had sought to turn a teenage grand prince's accession into a formal, sacral, imperial-style inauguration asserting hereditary legitimacy.

The nearer Muscovite ceremonial precedent was the 1498 coronation of Ivan III's grandson Dmitrii, supplemented with adapted Byzantine material. Ivan III himself was never crowned tsar.

The title Moscow settled and Europe argued over

Ivan became the first Russian ruler formally crowned as tsar. He was not necessarily the first Muscovite ruler to use the word — earlier rulers, Ivan III among them, had employed it selectively.

The rite produced no immediate international acceptance. Whether foreign rulers would recognize the tsarist title became a continuing diplomatic problem.