Ivan IV Vasilyevich (Russian: Иван IV Васильевич; 25 August 1530 – 28 March [O.S. 18 March] 1584), commonly known as Ivan the Terrible, was Grand Prince of Moscow and Sovereign of all Russia from 1533, and the first crowned Tsar of all Russia from 1547 until his death in 1584.
Ivan IV was the eldest son of Vasili III by his second wife Elena Glinskaya, and a grandson of Ivan III and Sophia Palaiologina. He succeeded his father after his death, when he was three years old. A group of reformers united around the young Ivan, crowning him the tsar of Russia in 1547 at the age of 16. Ivan's reign was characterised by Russia's transformation from a medieval state to an empire under the tsar but at an immense cost to its people and its broader, long-term economy.
In the early years of his reign, Ivan ruled with the Chosen Council and established the Zemsky Sobor, a new assembly. He also revised the legal code and introduced reforms, including elements of local self-government, as well as establishing the first Russian standing army, the streltsy. Ivan conquered the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, and significantly expanded the territory of Russia. After he had consolidated his power, Ivan rid himself of the advisers from the Chosen Council and triggered the Livonian War, which ravaged Russia and resulted in the loss of Livonia and Ingria but allowed him to establish greater autocratic control over Russia's nobility, which he violently purged with the oprichnina. The later years of Ivan's reign were marked by the massacre of Novgorod and the burning of Moscow by Tatars.
Contemporary sources present disparate accounts of Ivan's complex personality. He was described as intelligent and devout, but also prone to paranoia, rage, and episodic outbreaks of mental instability that increased with age. In one fit of anger, he murdered his eldest son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, and he might also have caused the miscarriage of the latter's unborn child. This left his younger son, the politically ineffectual Feodor Ivanovich, to inherit the throne, a man whose rule and subsequent childless death led directly to the end of the Rurik dynasty and the beginning of the Time of Troubles.