A new Tsar...



On January 16, 1547, the young Ivan IV was the first to be crowned “Tsar of all Russia”. Later the people will call him "the terrible".





The young tsar had an extremely joyless and brutal childhood. When he was eight years old, his mother, the regent Helena Glinskaja, was poisoned (forensic facial reconstruction) ...:



From now on the boy is in the hands of the powerful boyars Shuisky and Belsky ...



... who give him the most brutal possible "education" to rule himself.

Ivan did not discover his power until he was 13, turned Belsky cold and, with the help of the Kremlin guards, had Shuisky ripped apart by hunting dogs that he had starved for a week.

Ivan was only 16 years old when he had Makarij crowned tsar by the Moscow metropolitan. This contemporary engraving shows the event ...:


In reality, the prince of the church does not put a crown on the new tsar as in the engraving above, but rather the famous "Monomach's cap" ...:


The "Cap of Monomach" is a goldsmith's work from the 14th century, adorned with precious stones and a sable fur hem.

It was probably a gift from Uzbek Khan, a prince of the Golden Horde, to his brother-in-law Ivan Kalita of Moscow during the Tatar rule in Russia.

According to ancient sources, this Tatar hat was a symbol of Moscow's submission to the Khan of the Golden Horde. During the 15th or 16th century, it was given a cross on top to symbolize the god-given power of the tsar.

In Russian popular belief, the “Monomakh's cap” was a gift from the Christian Roman Emperor Constantine to Vladimir Monomakh, the prince of Kiev - and thus symbolizes Russia's claim to be the “third Rome”.



The last tsar to be crowned with the "Cap of Monomach" will be Peter I ("the Great"). From then on the Romanovs buy their own crown ...:



Tsar Ivan IV will reign for 41 years...





... and the number of people killed by himself (which he loved to do) or on his orders will only be surpassed in Russian history by Yossif Stalin.







Sergei Eisensetein's famous film about Ivan IV was certainly not by chance Stalin's favorite film ...:



This is what it really looked like, with a high probability:

On the basis of his preserved skull, Professor Grzasimow made a forensic facial reconstruction in what was then Leningrad in the early 80s ...:

I love this one..images, context.