Michael I

The election of Michael Romanov in 1613 ended the Time of Troubles and founded the dynasty that ruled Russia until 1917. Born in 1596, Michael was the son of the boyar Fyodor Nikitich Romanov, later Patriarch Filaret, and Xenia Shestova. The family's standing derived from Michael's great-aunt Anastasia Romanovna, the first wife of Ivan the Terrible, a connection to the extinct Rurikid line that strengthened his candidacy when a national assembly, the Zemsky Sobor, met to choose a tsar after years of famine, civil war, pretenders, and foreign occupation.

The sixteen-year-old Michael, then living with his mother at the Ipatiev Monastery near Kostroma, accepted the throne reluctantly and was crowned in Moscow in July 1613. The new government's first task was survival: it bought peace with Sweden at Stolbovo in 1617, ceding Russia's Baltic coastline, and concluded the Truce of Deulino with Poland-Lithuania in 1618, surrendering Smolensk but securing the release of Russian captives, among them the tsar's father.

From his return in 1619 until his death in 1633, Patriarch Filaret governed alongside his son with the title of Great Sovereign, and contemporaries regarded him as the dominant partner. The regime gradually restored administration and finances, relied heavily on assemblies of the land in its early years, and recruited foreign officers and craftsmen to modernize the army. An attempt to retake Smolensk in the war of 1632-34 failed, and the resulting Peace of Polyanovka confirmed the existing frontier, though the Polish king finally renounced his claim to the Russian throne.

Michael's first wife, Maria Dolgorukova, died within months of their wedding; in 1626 he married Eudoxia Streshneva, who bore him ten children. He died in Moscow in July 1645 and was succeeded without dispute by his son Alexis, whose own descendants, including Peter the Great, carried the Romanov line forward.