From the end of the fifteenth century to Peter’s time the main preoccupation of Russian foreign policy was the competition with Poland-Lithuania for territory and power on the East European plain. Poland was the hegemonic East European power for almost two centuries, and after initial success by 1514, Russia struggled in vain against its neighbour with few intervals of peace or goodwill. The long series of wars that resulted culminated in the war of 1653–67, which brought the Ukrainian Hetmanate into the Russian state and marked a decisive turn in Russia’s favour. Relations with the Tatar khanates to the south and east were more complex. Russia had conquered Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552–6 but was unwilling to confront Crimea, whose overlord was the Ottoman Empire, western Eurasia’s greatest power until the very end of the seventeenth century. The tsars preferred to build elaborate defences in the south, a line of forts and obstructions that stretched hundreds of miles from the Polish border to the Volga, and mobilise the army every spring rather than risk war with the Ottomans by pressing too hard on Crimea. The only area of relative security was the north-west, the Swedish border. The expansion of Sweden into Estonia in the 1570s and the capture of Ingria, ratified at Stolbovo in 1619, cut Russia off from the Baltic and placed an ever more powerful neighbour on Russia’s frontier, but Sweden’s main preoccupations were with Denmark, Germany and Poland, not Russia. In the seventeenth century Russia’s relations with Sweden were good (apart from the war of 1656–8, a result of the Polish tangle) and the King of Sweden was the only European monarch to be allowed to send a resident emissary to Moscow, from 1630 until the outbreak of the Northern War.