Byzantium, the ‘Second Rome’ was dead. Long live Moscow, therefore, the ‘Third Rome’! Ivan III (r. 1440–1505), known as ‘the Great’, was the first Muscovite prince to take the idea seriously, to adopt the Byzantine two-headed eagle as his emblem, and thereby to spread the notion that he was the only true successor of the Roman Caesars, the ‘tsars’. The
