Ivan III ended the independence of the Novgorod Republic in 1478, and over the following decade his government deported the city's landowning, merchant and clerical elites into central Muscovy, confiscating their estates and replacing them with Muscovite service gentry — one of the earliest systematic elite transfers in Russian state practice. The veche bell, the symbol of the city's self-government, was removed to Moscow. In January 1570 Ivan IV, alleging a treasonous conspiracy with Poland-Lithuania, brought his oprichnina troops to Novgorod and conducted a sack lasting several weeks. Estimates of those killed vary by more than an order of magnitude: the tsar's own synodikon lists about 1,500 names, while the Novgorod chronicles and foreign observers such as Heinrich von Staden give figures in the tens of thousands. The city never regained its former commercial position. The entry fills a gap in the atlas between the Mongol invasion of Rus and Russia's eastward expansion after 1552.
Grand Prince Ivan III and later Tsar Ivan IV annexed the Novgorod Republic, deported its landholding and merchant families to central Muscovy and settled Muscovite servitors on their estates
The Muscovite cadastres (pistsovye knigi) compiled after annexation record taxable peasant households in the Novgorod pyatiny but not a total population, and estimates of the city itself range from about 20,000 to 35,000 in the late fifteenth century. The affected figure combines two events almost a century apart - the deportation of landholding and merchant families in 1478-89 and the sack of 1570, whose death toll is variously given as 2,000 to 15,000 - so no single-year denominator fits it.
The low end is the count of names in Ivan IV's synodikon of the disgraced, compiled at his own order; the high end comes from the Novgorod Third Chronicle and from foreign accounts including that of the oprichnik Heinrich von Staden. The disagreement turns on whether chronicle round numbers describe a count or a rhetorical enormity, and on whether famine and plague deaths in the following year are folded in.
The Novgorod chronicles and the account of the oprichnik Heinrich von Staden describe the killings, drownings in the Volkhov and torture during the 1570 sack.
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