Moscovia (region)

Moscovia or Muscovy (Russian: Моско́вия, romanized: Moskoviya) is a historical region in Central Russia.

[1] Moscovia was the political and geographical name of the Russian state and the Tsardom of Russia in Western sources, used with varying degrees of priority in parallel with the ethnographic name Russia (Russian: Руссия, romanized: Russiya) from the 15th to the beginning of the 18th century.

[4][5] Later in Western and Central Europe it was transferred to the Tsardom of Russia, formed around Moscow under Ivan III.

Various researchers believe that its use was facilitated by Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth propaganda, which explicitly retained the terminology of feudal fragmentation, denying the legitimacy of the struggle of Ivan III and his successors for the reunification of the Rus' lands.

[6] The Latinate Moscovia was not used,[7] entering the Russian language no earlier than the 18th century as an incompletely mastered borrowing.