Ronchey, S. “La Terza Roma.” Il Medioevo, X, Il Quattrocento: Storia. Ed. U. Eco. Milan: Motta, 2009. 260-68. (= Il Medioevo: Esplorazioni, commerci, utopie, Milan: Encyclomedia Publishers, 2011. 105-8).

The fall of Byzantium into the hands of Mehmet II left the imperial title of Constantine vacant. This legacy would be claimed by Greek exiles (Theodora Comnena, Thomas Palaeologus), by Western monarchs (Maximilian Habsburg, Charles V) and, especially, by the young orthodox principality of Moscow. Here the pre-existing imperial ideology of clear Byzantine derivation was reinforced through the marriage of Zoe Palaeologina and Ivan III, which sanctioned the transfer, later theorised by Philotheus of Pskov, of the legacy of the Byzantine orthodox empire to Moscow, the “Third Rome”. The administrative re-organisation carried out under Ivan IV Grozny, according to the dictates of the Byzantine ideology of the centralised state, would ultimately and definitively complete this cultural, ideological, political and administrative assimilation.