A reluctant teenager is placed on a troubled throne
3 MARCH 1613
At dawn on 3 March 1613, a teenage boy and his mother were accosted by a throng of Orthodox bishops and aristocrats outside the Ipatiev monastery in Kostroma, some 200 miles north-east of Moscow. The adolescent was only 16 years old, but he would have doubtlessly recognised some of the holy relics in the group’s possession – not least the Feodorovskaya Icon of the Mother of God, which was sacred to his family. For this was no ordinary teenager, but the young noble Michael Fyodorovich Romanov, and the delegation was there to inform him that he was now tsar and grand prince of all Russia: news that immediately sent him into a deep shock.
The decision to appoint Romanov hadn’t happened overnight, however. A few weeks earlier, representatives from across Russia’s social classes had gathered in Moscow to form a council known as the Zemsky Sobor (‘assembly of the land’) and set about solving the tsardom’s myriad problems. These issues were themselves rooted in an even longer history of turmoil, beginning in 1598 when the reigning tsar, Fyodor I, had died without an heir. The throne had then passed to a series of short-lived rulers (including three imposters each pretending to be Fyodor’s deceased half-brother, Dmitri), and by 1613, Russians were crying out for stability.
Yet it wasn’t that simple. The Zemsky Sobor was dominated by the heads of Moscow’s most noble families, known as the boyars, who each expressed different views about who should take the throne. Several members endorsed the Swedish prince Karl Filip, whose country occupied north-western Russia, while others proposed the Polish-Lithuanian prince Władysław. The Cossack delegates, meanwhile, denounced the foreign candidates an
