Muscovy, 1600–1660

Job owed his see to Boris, who had persuaded the patriarch of Constantinople to make Moscow a patriarchate in 1589. When Tsar Fyodor died childless in 1598, Job put Boris forward to the assembly of the land and led the procession to the Novodevichy Convent that begged him to take the crown. The elected tsar's legitimacy rested on that blessing.

An elected tsar needed a dynasty, and the Romanovs, first cousins of the last tsar, were the nearest rival house. In 1600–1601 Boris's government accused them of keeping magic roots to kill the royal family, and broke them up. Then the harvests failed. Through the famine of 1601–1603 Boris gave out grain and money until the treasury ran dry, but hunger and banditry wore away trust in his rule.

Fyodor Romanov, the eldest of the brothers, was forced to become a monk under the name Filaret and shut in the Antoniev-Siysky Monastery in the far north. Tonsure was meant to end his career at court. Instead it put him on the Church's ladder: within five years he was a metropolitan, and in the end he would be patriarch and co-ruler with his son.

Fyodor's wife, Ksenia Shestova, was forced to take the veil as the nun Marfa and exiled to Tolvuya by Lake Onega, parted from her children. Their son Michael, not yet five, was sent off to Beloozero. Twelve years later an assembly of the land would choose that boy as tsar.

The famine turned runaway bondsmen, whom their masters would not feed, into armed bands. The largest, operating near Moscow itself, followed a chief remembered as Khlopko Kosolap and numbered up to six hundred men. They robbed for food rather than power, and some had served in the households of the purged boyars.

In August 1603 Boris sent the okolnichy Ivan Basmanov with a hundred streltsy against Khlopko's band. In mid-September the rebels ambushed them west of Moscow. Basmanov was killed, but his men won the fight and took the wounded Khlopko, who was executed. Some of the survivors fled south, where they would join Bolotnikov's rising.

A young man in Poland–Lithuania claimed to be Dmitry, Ivan the Terrible's youngest son, who had died at Uglich in 1591. Boris's government named him as Grigory Otrepyev, a runaway monk; who he really was is still disputed. In October 1604 he crossed into Muscovy with a few thousand men, and the frontier towns of the south-west went over to him.

Jerzy Mniszech, voivode of Sandomierz, raised the claimant's troops from his friends and kin. Dmitry promised to marry his daughter Marina and in June 1604 granted him half of the Smolensk lands and the Seversk principality. In December Mniszech's force beat the tsar's army at Novgorod-Seversky; in January 1605 he went home, ill.

Prince Fyodor Mstislavsky, first boyar of the Duma, led Boris's army. Beaten and wounded at Novgorod-Seversky in December 1604, he routed the claimant at Dobrynichi in January 1605, and Dmitry fell back on Putivl. Mstislavsky then failed to take Kromy, held for Dmitry by Don Cossacks, and kept his place as first boyar under every ruler that followed.

In March 1604, at Kraków, King Sigismund III received the claimant and gave him his backing but promised no army; the expedition was raised by magnates and volunteers. The king's own war on Muscovy would come five years later, against a different tsar.

Boris died suddenly in April 1605, and his son Fyodor, sixteen, succeeded him with his mother as regent. The new government needed the army at once, and gave the command at Kromy to Prince Andrei Telyatevsky, son-in-law of the powerful Semyon Godunov, over Pyotr Basmanov's head.

Basmanov had held Novgorod-Seversky against the claimant, and Boris had made him a boyar for it. Ranked below Telyatevsky, an insult under the rules of precedence, he went over to Dmitry with the army besieging Kromy on 7 May 1605, opening the road to Moscow. He served the new tsar to the end.

Prince Vasily Golitsyn, a commander at Kromy and one of the Golitsyn kinsmen behind the plot there, joined the defection, having himself tied up to look like a prisoner. In June Dmitry sent him ahead to Moscow, where he directed the killing of Fyodor II.

Maria, Boris's widow and a daughter of Ivan the Terrible's enforcer Malyuta Skuratov, ruled as regent for her son. On 10 June 1605 Dmitry's men strangled her and Fyodor, and ten days later the claimant entered Moscow. The Godunov dynasty had lasted seven years.

Job stood by the Godunovs and urged Moscow to resist the claimant. In June 1605 armed supporters of Dmitry burst into the Dormition Cathedral, Basmanov denounced him as a traitor, and a council retired him for age and ill health. He was sent back to his old monastery at Staritsa, where he went blind.

Ignatius, a Greek from Crete who had become archbishop of Ryazan, had sworn in Dmitry's supporters at Tula before the claimant reached Moscow. Elected patriarch on 30 June 1605, he crowned Dmitry in July and in May 1606 crowned Marina and married the couple. After the coup Shuisky deposed him and confined him in the Chudov Monastery.

Dmitry, eager to show himself kin to the old nobility, freed the Romanovs. Filaret came out of the north to become metropolitan of Rostov, and Marfa was reunited with their son. In June 1606 Shuisky sent Filaret to Uglich to bring the real Dmitry's remains to Moscow, where they were enshrined as a saint's, and the Shuiskys now named Boris as the boy's murderer.

Maria Nagaya, Ivan the Terrible's last wife, had been made a nun after her son Dmitry's death at Uglich; she too bore the name Marfa. On 18 July 1605 she entered Moscow and publicly accepted the claimant as her son, the strongest proof he could have. When he was killed she disowned him, and in June 1606 received her real son's remains.

Marina Mniszech reached Moscow in May 1606 with her father and a large Polish retinue, and on 8 May, by the Russian calendar, was crowned tsaritsa and married to Dmitry. The marriage terms let her remain Catholic, and the armed Poles in the city angered Muscovites: the opening the plotters needed.

Prince Vasily Shuisky had led the 1591 inquiry that found the real Dmitry's death an accident. Condemned for plotting in 1605, he was pardoned on the scaffold. On 17 May 1606 his men stormed the Kremlin and killed Dmitry and Basmanov. Proclaimed tsar, he swore on the cross to put no one to death without the boyars' counsel, but his narrow coup left many unwilling to accept him.

Hermogenes, metropolitan of Kazan, had been sent away from Moscow for opposing Dmitry's marriage to a Catholic. Under Shuisky he was installed as patriarch on 3 July 1606. He backed the new tsar against the rebels, denouncing Bolotnikov's army as the work of Satan, and would later refuse any tsar who stayed Catholic.

Prince Grigory Shakhovskoy had gone over to Dmitry in 1605. After the coup Shuisky sent him out of Moscow as voivode of Putivl, the town that had sheltered the claimant. There he told the townsmen that the boyars had murdered another man in Dmitry's place and that the tsar lived. The Seversk towns rose, and he looked for someone to play the tsar.

Ivan Bolotnikov, a runaway bondsman who had rowed in a Turkish galley, reached Putivl with a letter saying he served Tsar Dmitry, and Shakhovskoy gave him command. With Cossacks, runaway serfs, townsmen and some service nobles he marched north, and by October 1606 camped at Kolomenskoye outside Moscow. Driven back, he held Kaluga and then Tula, where he surrendered in October 1607 on a promise of pardon. Shuisky had him blinded and drowned.

Prokopy Lyapunov, leader of the Ryazan nobles, marched on Moscow with the rising in autumn 1606. On 15 November, offered a Duma rank and silver, he took the Ryazan men over to Shuisky. His defection split the rebels' gentry from their Cossacks and runaways, and he went on to help besiege Tula.

Prince Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky, the tsar's twenty-year-old kinsman, attacked the rebel camps at Kolomenskoye on 2 December 1606 and sent Bolotnikov south. He took part in the siege of Tula in 1607 and became the government's most promising commander.

A second man calling himself Dmitry appeared at Starodub in summer 1607, while Bolotnikov still held Tula; who he was has never been established, and Bolotnikov's appeals to him went unanswered. In 1608 Polish adventurers and Cossacks brought him to the edge of Moscow, and at Tushino he set up a rival court with boyars, chancelleries and a patriarch of its own.

Prince Roman Różyński, a Polish–Lithuanian noble who had raised troops on borrowed money, seized command of the pretender's army in a coup at Oryol in April 1608. On 10–11 May he routed the tsar's brother Dmitry Shuisky at Bolkhov and opened the road to Tushino. When the camp fell apart he set off to join the king, and died of his wounds in April 1610.

Ivan Zarutsky, a Cossack ataman from Ternopil who had fought in Bolotnikov's rising, brought some five thousand Don Cossacks to the pretender at Oryol in spring 1608. At Tushino he sat on the pretender's council and was made a boyar.

Jan Piotr Sapieha, a Lithuanian commander who had fought at Kircholm, joined the pretender in August 1608 with some seven thousand cavalry. From September 1608 to January 1610 he besieged the Trinity–Sergius Monastery without taking it. He fought on near Moscow until he died in the Kremlin in October 1611.

Released with her father under Shuisky's truce with Poland in 1608, Marina was brought to Tushino instead of going home, and there, urged on by her father, recognised the second Dmitry as her husband. Her consent tied the new pretender to the crowned tsaritsa of 1606.

In 1608 Tushino troops took Rostov and carried Metropolitan Filaret to the pretender, who named him patriarch while Hermogenes remained patriarch in Moscow. How willingly Filaret served is still argued; in 1610 he was recovered from the Tushinites.

Prince Dmitry Trubetskoy, unhappy with Shuisky's rule, rode over to Tushino in December 1608 after the fighting on the Khodynka, and the pretender made him a boyar. With Zarutsky he would later lead the Cossack camps that besieged the Poles in Moscow.

Charles IX had taken the Swedish throne from his Catholic nephew Sigismund III, and had been offering Shuisky help since 1606. By the Treaty of Vyborg in February 1609 he sent an army in return for pay and the border fortress of Korela with its district.

Jacob De la Gardie, twenty-six, led some twelve thousand mercenaries out of Novgorod in spring 1609 alongside the Russian army Skopin-Shuisky was raising. Lack of pay repeatedly held his troops up, but together they cleared the roads north of Moscow.

Skopin-Shuisky, sent to Novgorod to win Swedish help, marched south with De la Gardie, took Tver and Torzhok, beat Sapieha at Kalyazin and forced him to lift the siege of the Trinity monastery. In March 1610 the two rode into Moscow; the young prince was hailed as the saviour of the land, and some talked of him as the next tsar.

Sigismund III, Charles IX's nephew, still claimed the Swedish crown his uncle had taken, and treated the Swedish alliance with Shuisky as grounds for war. In September 1609 he crossed the border himself and laid siege to Smolensk. Most of the Poles at Tushino left the pretender for their king, and in December the second Dmitry fled to Kaluga.

Mikhail Shein, voivode of Smolensk since 1607, held the city for twenty months. When the Poles finally stormed it in June 1611 he fought on until captured, was tortured to reveal where the townspeople had hidden their treasure, and was taken to Poland with his family. He would come home only in 1619.

Mikhail Glebovich Saltykov, a boyar who had searched the Romanovs' house for the magic roots in 1600 and gone over to Dmitry at Kromy, headed the most pro-Polish group at Tushino. As the camp broke up he led its Russian nobles to Sigismund at Smolensk, and in February 1610 agreed terms for the king's son Władysław to become tsar.

Skopin-Shuisky died suddenly in April 1610, weeks after his triumph; rumour said Dmitry Shuisky's wife, a sister of Boris's widow Maria, had poisoned him at her husband's urging. Dmitry, the childless tsar's brother and heir, took over the army. On 4 July 1610 at Klushino, Żółkiewski's much smaller force routed him and De la Gardie's mercenaries.

Without an army Vasily Shuisky could not hold Moscow. On 17 July 1610, by the Russian calendar, boyars and nobles forced him from the throne and had him shorn as a monk. He and his brother Dmitry were taken to Poland as prisoners, and both died at Gostynin in 1612.

Prince Fyodor Mstislavsky, first in the Duma for more than twenty years, headed the seven boyars who now governed. Fearing the second Dmitry, who was again near Moscow, more than the Poles, they agreed on 17 August 1610 to take Sigismund's son Władysław as tsar on condition he became Orthodox, and in September let a Polish garrison into the Kremlin.

Prince Vasily Golitsyn, who had helped bring down both Dmitry and Shuisky, led the great embassy to Sigismund's camp at Smolensk in autumn 1610, with Filaret beside him. The king wanted Smolensk's surrender and the crown for himself; the envoys would not yield, and in spring 1611 they were made prisoners. Golitsyn died in captivity in 1619.

Stanisław Żółkiewski, field hetman of the Crown, won at Klushino against heavy odds, and some of the hired foreign troops came over to him. He marched on Moscow and negotiated the treaty that made Władysław tsar. In October he left a garrison in the Kremlin and went to the king with the deposed Shuisky. His memoir of the war is sharply critical of Sigismund's policy.

Władysław, fifteen, was Sigismund's eldest son. Moscow swore to him and struck coins in his name, but his father would neither send him nor let him convert, and proposed to govern as regent himself. Władysław never came and was never crowned, but styled himself grand duke of Moscow until 1634.

Aleksander Gosiewski, a Lithuanian commander, was given the Kremlin garrison and, once Żółkiewski left, became the real ruler of Moscow. At the end of 1610 he had Patriarch Hermogenes arrested for opposing Władysław. When the city rose in March 1611 he ordered it set on fire to keep hold of the Kremlin.

From Kaluga the second Dmitry marched on Moscow again in summer 1610, which was why the boyars hurried to accept Władysław. Suspecting treachery, he had the Kasimov khan Uraz-Muhammad, who had visited the king's camp, killed.

Prince Pyotr Urusov, a baptised Nogai mirza who commanded the pretender's Tatar guard, called the khan's death murder to his face and spent six weeks in prison until Marina had him freed. On 11 December 1610, riding out with the pretender near Kaluga, he shot him dead and fled south. Days later Marina gave birth to a son.

Hermogenes refused to sign any appeal to Sigismund or to condemn the militias. In December 1610 he wrote to the towns urging them to rise against the Poles, and he openly backed Lyapunov's army. Shut in the Chudov Monastery, he blessed the new Nizhny Novgorod militia from his cell, and in February 1612 died there of hunger.

Dionysius had become archimandrite of the Trinity–Sergius Monastery in February 1610, just after Skopin-Shuisky lifted its siege. With the monastery's reach behind him he sent letters to the towns in 1611 and 1612 urging them to back the militias, and in summer 1612 he blessed Pozharsky's army on its way to Moscow.

Avraamy Palitsyn, the monastery's cellarer, wrote the letters with Dionysius; copies from June and October 1611 and April 1612 survive. On 24 August 1612 he went into Trubetskoy's Cossack camp and talked the Cossacks into joining the battle. His history of the Troubles, finished around 1620, is a key source, though it inflates his own part.

Answering Hermogenes's call, Lyapunov raised the first militia and in spring 1611 joined forces under Moscow's walls with Trubetskoy and Zarutsky, both former Tushino boyars. They took most of the city and shut the Poles in the Kremlin and Kitay-gorod. But his council's decree restoring masters' claims to runaways angered the Cossacks, and on 22 July, shown a forged order in his hand to kill them, they cut him down.

Most of Lyapunov's nobles went home; Trubetskoy and Zarutsky held the siege with the Cossack camps. A third 'Dmitry', a deacon's son known as Sidorka, had been received at Pskov in December 1611, and on 2 March 1612 the Cossack circle outside Moscow swore allegiance to him. The Nizhny Novgorod militia refused him. He was seized at Pskov in late May, and executed after Michael's election.

Zarutsky pressed the claim of Marina's infant son Ivan, whom Hermogenes told the towns to reject. When the Nizhny Novgorod militia approached in summer 1612 he left the siege with part of the Cossacks and took Marina and the boy to Kolomna.

After the first militia broke up, Kuzma Minin, a meat trader elected elder of Nizhny Novgorod, called on the townsmen in autumn 1611 to pay for a new army, giving a third or a fifth of their property. Then he looked for a commander of good name, and found one still recovering from his wounds.

Prince Dmitry Pozharsky had fought the garrison in the March 1611 rising and been badly wounded. He agreed to lead the new army on condition that Minin manage its money. From April to July 1612 the militia stood at Yaroslavl, which his kinsmen Dmitry and Roman Pozharsky had secured for it, and its Council of All the Land governed the towns it held.

Trubetskoy's Cossacks had besieged the Kremlin since 1611 and distrusted the nobles' army. When Chodkiewicz attacked in August 1612 they joined the fight at the decisive moment, and in September Trubetskoy and Pozharsky agreed to act together. On 22 October, by the Russian calendar, his Cossacks stormed Kitay-gorod, and the garrison began to negotiate.

Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, grand hetman of Lithuania, brought supplies and reinforcements for the starving Kremlin garrison in late August 1612. In three days of fighting outside the walls Pozharsky's militia and Trubetskoy's Cossacks threw him back. Gosiewski had already handed the command to Mikołaj Strus, and at the end of October the garrison surrendered.

The assembly of the land elected Michael Romanov, sixteen, in February 1613: kin of the old dynasty's last tsar, of a family Boris had persecuted, with backing from churchmen, boyars and the Cossacks still camped in Moscow. Mstislavsky signed the election charter first among the boyars. Michael's father Filaret was a prisoner in Poland, and the wars went on.

Marfa at first refused to let her son go, saying he was too young. Once he was crowned, the great nun shaped his court from her convent quarters, bringing in her own relatives, though she did not rule beside him. In 1618 she approved the harsh punishment of the Trinity archimandrite Dionysius for his corrections to the service book.

Boris Saltykov, son of Marfa's sister and so Michael's first cousin, ran the Grand Palace office and was made a boyar in December 1613. Pozharsky, ordered to proclaim the promotion, refused it as beneath his rank and went home. In 1614 De la Gardie heard from captives that nothing in the Duma was decided without Saltykov.

Mikhail Saltykov, Boris's younger brother, headed the Apothecary Office from 1615. In 1616 Michael chose Maria Khlopova as his bride, and the Saltykovs turned his mother against her. When the girl fell ill, Mikhail told the tsar the doctors judged it incurable; Marfa demanded she go, and she and her family were exiled to Tobolsk.

Ivan, Marina's son by the second Dmitry, was born at Kaluga days after his father's murder. Kaluga, Kazan and Vyatka swore to him as heir, and the 1613 assembly expressly refused 'Marinka's son'. His supporters called him Tsarevich Ivan Dmitrievich; to Moscow he was Vorenok, the thief's whelp.

Zarutsky carried Marina and the boy south. Beaten near Voronezh in summer 1613, he crossed the Don and seized Astrakhan, where his violence set off a rising in May 1614, and he fled to the Yaik.

Prince Ivan Odoevsky the Younger, made boyar in December 1613, pursued Zarutsky from Ryazan to Voronezh and down the Volga to Astrakhan. On 23 June 1614 streltsy officers caught Zarutsky, Marina and the boy on the Yaik. In Moscow Zarutsky was impaled and the three-year-old hanged; Marina died in prison at Kolomna.

After Klushino De la Gardie turned his army on the north-west. On 16 July 1611 he took Novgorod after a brief defence, and ten days later the city's leaders signed a treaty accepting one of Charles IX's sons as their ruler and the Swedish king as protector. Swedish garrisons held the Novgorod land for six years.

Isidor, metropolitan of Novgorod, who had crowned Vasily Shuisky in 1606, surrendered the kremlin with the voivode Ivan Odoevsky the Elder and signed the treaty of 25 July 1611. He even wrote to the Yaroslavl militia urging it to elect a Swedish prince, but he never swore allegiance to the Swedes himself.

Charles Philip, Charles IX's younger son, was ten when De la Gardie put him forward. His mother would not let him go to Russia, and his brother doubted the offer was serious. In summer 1613 he went to Vyborg to discuss terms, but Moscow had already elected Michael, and he went home.

Gustavus Adolphus inherited the Russian war when Charles IX died in October 1611. The Novgorod land stayed in Swedish hands, and Trubetskoy's attempt to retake it was beaten at Bronnitsa in 1614. In 1615 the king besieged Pskov himself, lost many men to sickness and hunger, withdrew, and turned to negotiation.

Sir John Merrick, who had grown up in the Muscovy Company's houses and served as English ambassador to Boris, came back in 1614 as James I's envoy and mediated between Russia and Sweden. At Stolbovo in February 1617 Sweden returned Novgorod but kept Ingria and Korela, shutting Muscovy off from the Baltic.

Władysław, now twenty-two, still styled himself tsar and in 1617 invaded to take the throne by force. His army under Chodkiewicz took Dorogobuzh and Vyazma, but money ran short and the Sejm would fund only the campaign of 1618. In October 1618 they camped at Tushino, where the second Dmitry had held court, and prepared to storm Moscow.

Petro Sahaidachny, hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, marched about twenty thousand Cossacks north in summer 1618, sacking Livny and Yelets on the way, and joined Władysław before Moscow. On the night of 10–11 October their assault on the walls was beaten back.

Fyodor Sheremetev, one of the Seven Boyars of 1610 and head of Michael's government until 1619, led the Russian envoys. At Deulino, near the Trinity monastery, they signed a truce of fourteen and a half years in December 1618: Smolensk and the Chernigov–Seversk lands went to the Commonwealth, Władysław kept his title, and prisoners were to be exchanged, Filaret among them.

Hessel Gerritsz, an Amsterdam engraver and mapmaker, published in 1613 a map of Russia drawn under Fyodor Godunov when he was tsarevich, and reissued it, corrected, in 1614. The Blaeu firm went on reprinting it until 1665, so the Godunov survey outlived the dynasty in Europe's atlases.

Ivan Timofeyev, a chancery clerk who had served in Novgorod since 1607, lived through the Swedish occupation close to Isidor. A note in his manuscript says the metropolitan pressed him to write down what had happened. His Vremennik asks why rulers and nobles broke faith in the Troubles, with entries running to 1627–1628.

In 1616 Michael ordered Dionysius to correct the book of church rites. He and his helpers removed the words 'and with fire' from the prayer for blessing the waters at Epiphany, and in July 1618 a church council condemned them as heretics; Dionysius was punished with Marfa's consent.

Theophanes III, patriarch of Jerusalem, reached Moscow in April 1619. On 24 June he enthroned Filaret as patriarch; a week later a council reopened the case of the Trinity archimandrite and acquitted Dionysius and his helpers in full. Theophanes visited the Trinity monastery that year, and in 1620, in Kyiv, restored the Orthodox hierarchy there.

Exchanged under the Deulino truce, Filaret reached Moscow on 14 June 1619 and was enthroned patriarch ten days later. He took the title Great Sovereign, the tsar's own, and charters went out in the names of father and son. For fourteen years he ran the government, from appointments to foreign policy.

Ivan Gramotin had served Dmitry, Shuisky, the Tushino pretender and King Sigismund in turn, heading the Ambassadorial Office under several of them, and had stayed in Poland until 1618. Restored as Duma secretary, under Filaret he handled embassies from England and Turkey.

Michael had not given up the bride the Saltykovs had sent away. Filaret disagreed with Marfa and reproached his son for giving in, and in 1621 the girl was moved to Nizhny Novgorod, to the house that had been Kuzma Minin's. In 1623 an inquiry under Fyodor Sheremetev questioned the doctors, found her healthy and exposed the brothers' lie. Marfa still refused the match.

Boris and Mikhail Saltykov were stripped of their court ranks and sent with their families to distant estates in 1623. They stayed there ten years, until Filaret was dead.

Arthur Dee, son of the Elizabethan scholar John Dee, came to Moscow on James I's recommendation as one of the tsar's physicians and stayed about fourteen years. There he compiled Fasciculus Chemicus, an anthology of alchemical writings, finished in 1629 and printed in Paris in 1631.

With Khlopova set aside, Marfa chose Princess Maria Dolgorukova, and Michael married her on 19 September 1624 with Filaret's blessing. Five months later she was dead, and the throne still had no heir.

Evdokia Streshneva, daughter of a minor nobleman from Meshchovsk, was chosen at a bride-show in 1626, when Michael looked over the finalists a second time; messengers had to fetch her father from his distant estate to bless the match. They married that February.

Alexei was born in March 1629, the couple's first son. Boris Morozov would become his tutor in 1634. With a male heir, the dynasty an assembly had elected in 1613 could at last pass on the throne by birth.

Gramotin kept up his intrigues, and in 1626 Filaret's patience ran out: he had the Duma secretary sent away to Alatyr. Gramotin came back only after Filaret's death, and in 1634 was made keeper of the seal.

Yefim Telepnev, master of the Moscow mint, had been the clerk ordered in 1609 to hand Korela over to the Swedes under the Vyborg treaty. He took over the Ambassadorial Office on 22 December 1626, though foreign policy was Filaret's. In July 1630 he was dismissed, stripped of his rank and exiled.

Fyodor Likhachev, a Duma secretary of the Military Office who had carried the ritual dish at both of Michael's weddings, took over the Ambassadorial Office in 1630. In 1627 he and a colleague had restored the Book of the Great Map, the register describing the state's great survey map.

Christopher Galloway, a Scottish clockmaker who came to Moscow around 1621 on James I's commission, proposed a new clock for the Kremlin's Frolov Gate and a tower to carry it. With the Russian builder Bazhen Ogurtsov he raised the hipped tower in 1624–1625; its dial turned while the hand stood still. It is now the Spasskaya Tower. In 1633 he built the Kremlin's water-lifting machine.

Alexander Leslie, a Scottish colonel, had fought for Poland, been captured at Smolensk in 1616, served Russia briefly and then Sweden. He came back to Moscow with a Swedish mission in January 1630 and entered the tsar's service that March. In 1631 he went to Sweden to hire soldiers for the new regiments of Western formation that Filaret's government was raising against Smolensk.

Shein, Smolensk's defender in 1609–1611 and one of Filaret's closest advisers since they came home together, was given the army when Sigismund III died in 1632 and the truce ran out. He marched from Mozhaysk in October and laid siege to Smolensk in early December 1632, with Leslie commanding two of the new regiments.

Artemy Izmailov, an okolnichy who had been close to Vasily Shuisky, was Shein's second commander. Through 1633 the siege dragged on as foreign officers quarrelled, sickness spread and soldiers deserted to their homes. After the surrender the Duma condemned both men for treason, and on 28 April 1634 they were executed on Red Square, Izmailov with his son Vasily.

Krzysztof Radziwiłł, field hetman of Lithuania since 1615 and lord of Biržai, kept the besiegers under pressure until relief came, and was instrumental in forcing the Russian army to capitulate.

Władysław, elected king after his father's death, reached Smolensk in August 1633, broke the siege and in turn surrounded Shein's camp. In February 1634 Shein capitulated and marched out, leaving his guns. The king who had once been chosen tsar had beaten the government that shut him out.

Prince Alexei Lvov, an okolnichy, negotiated the Peace of Polyanovka with Fyodor Sheremetev in 1634. Muscovy gave up its gains and Smolensk stayed with the Commonwealth, but for 20,000 rubles Władysław renounced his claim to the Russian throne and returned the royal regalia taken in the Troubles.

Filaret died in October 1633, with the army still stuck before Smolensk. His chosen successor, Joasaph, archbishop of Pskov and once a monk at Solovki under Isidor, was elected patriarch on 1 February 1634. The patriarch's name no longer stood beside the tsar's on state charters; Joasaph confined himself to church discipline.

Ruling alone from 1633, Michael brought the Saltykovs back from exile and governed through Fyodor Sheremetev and his own kin. After the defeat at Smolensk he avoided new wars, sought foreign capital and skills, and looked for a foreign husband for his daughter.

Andries Winius, a Dutch merchant who had exported Russian grain, found good ore near Tula and in 1632 won the right to build an ironworks there, on condition he teach the tsar's men the trade. With his partner Peter Marselis he opened the first works on the Tulitsa in 1637, the start of Tula's iron and arms industry.

Adam Olearius was secretary of the embassies Duke Frederick III of Holstein-Gottorp sent through Russia to Persia in search of a silk route; they entered Moscow in August 1634 and March 1636. Michael offered him a post as court astronomer, which he declined. His Description of the Journey to Muscovy, published in 1647 and enlarged in 1656, described the country for European readers.

Irina, Michael's eldest daughter, was thirteen when he decided in 1640 to marry her to Valdemar Christian, a son of Christian IV of Denmark, and Marselis was sent to Copenhagen to arrange it. The Danes insisted that the bridegroom keep his Lutheran faith.

Count Valdemar Christian arrived in Moscow in January 1644 and refused to become Orthodox. Patriarch Joseph pressed him, and Orthodox and Lutheran clergy debated from June 1644 to July 1645; when he asked to go home he was put under guard. He was freed only after Michael's death, by the new tsar Alexei.

After Joasaph died in 1640 the see stood empty for nearly a year and a half, until Joseph was chosen by lot in 1642. Under him the Moscow Print Yard issued more service books than ever before, ninety-two titles, fixing the Russian texts that Nikon would later revise. He also led the pressure on Valdemar Christian to convert.

In 1637 the Don Cossacks, on their own decision, stormed the Ottoman fortress of Azov at the mouth of the Don. In 1641 a great Ottoman and Crimean army besieged it, and the ataman Osip Petrov led the defence until the attackers gave up. Holding Azov now meant war with the sultan, so the Cossacks offered it to the tsar.

Fyodor Poroshin, the Don Host's clerk, is usually credited with the Tale of the Azov Siege, a poetic account of the defence written about 1641–1642 to press Moscow to keep the fortress. An assembly of the land debated the offer in 1642, the tsar declined a war with the Ottomans, and that summer the Cossacks left Azov, wrecking its walls.

Pyotr Golovin, named first voivode of the Lena country in 1638, reached it in 1641 and made Yakutsk the base for the far north-east, moving its fort in 1643 to a site Vasily Poyarkov had found. He ruled harshly, torturing officers he suspected of plotting, and faced a Yakut rising in 1642.

Vasily Poyarkov left Yakutsk in July 1643 with a party of Cossacks to find the Daurs' grain lands. He crossed the Stanovoy range, reached the Amur by the Zeya in 1644, sailed down it to the sea and came back along the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk in 1646 with a fraction of his men; many had died of hunger and in fights with the river peoples.

Michael died in July 1645, and Alexei, sixteen, became tsar; Valdemar Christian was allowed to go home. The young tsar's trust went to the man who had raised him since 1634.

Boris Morozov took charge of the key offices for revenue, the army and the court, and put his own men into them. His government cut salaries and looked for new sources of revenue.

Nazar Chistoy, a Yaroslavl merchant turned Duma secretary, was Morozov's chief economic adviser and from 1647 head of the Ambassadorial Office. His salt duty of February 1646 replaced two direct taxes, but salt grew so dear that sales fell, and in December 1647 it was dropped; the government then demanded two years' arrears of the old taxes.

In January 1648 Alexei married Maria Miloslavskaya, daughter of a nobleman in Morozov's service. Ten days later Morozov married her sister Anna, so the tsar's chief minister became his brother-in-law.

Ilya Miloslavsky, the brides' father, had served Morozov as envoy to Constantinople in 1643 and to the Netherlands in 1646–1647. After the weddings he was made okolnichy and, that same year, boyar, and his kinsmen took posts around the court.

Leonty Pleshcheyev, head of the Zemsky Office that policed and judged Moscow, used his kinship with the Miloslavskys to squeeze the townspeople. On 25 May 1648, by the Russian calendar, a crowd stopped the tsar's horse to petition against him; courtiers rode into them and Moscow rose. Pleshcheyev was handed over and beaten to death, and Chistoy was killed too.

Pyotr Trakhaniotov, Pleshcheyev's brother-in-law and one of Morozov's men, ran the Artillery Office. The rioters sacked his house and demanded him. Alexei sent him off as voivode of Ustyuzhna, but he was brought back and executed on 5 June. To save Morozov the tsar sent him to the Kirillov monastery; he was back by October.

To answer the petitions, Alexei appointed Prince Nikita Odoevsky in summer 1648 to head a commission that would gather and sort all the laws issued since 1607 and draft a code. An assembly of the land debated and amended it, and on 29 January 1649 the Law Code was completed.

Fyodor Griboyedov, a clerk who had served under Odoevsky before, sat on the commission and helped draft the code. It let landlords reclaim runaway peasants with no time limit, which made serfdom permanent, and forbade boyars to take the tsar's taxpayers as their bondsmen.

Stefan Vonifatiev, archpriest of the Kremlin's Annunciation Cathedral and the young tsar's confessor, led a circle later called the Zealots of Piety: Ivan Neronov, Avvakum and other priests who wanted real preaching, orderly services and sober clergy. In February 1649 he attacked the aged Patriarch Joseph and the bishops for blocking reform.

Nikon met the young tsar in 1646 and was made archimandrite of the Novospassky Monastery in Moscow, where he joined Stefan's circle. In March 1649 the visiting patriarch of Jerusalem consecrated him metropolitan of Novgorod. When Novgorod rose over grain prices in March 1650 he cursed the rebels' leaders from the pulpit and was beaten by the crowd.

Petro Mohyla, Orthodox metropolitan of Kyiv in the Commonwealth, founded in 1632 the college that taught Kyiv's clergy Greek and Latin. He died at the start of 1647, but his college trained the scholars Moscow now wanted for its books.

Fyodor Rtishchev, one of Alexei's closest friends, built a monastery outside Moscow at his own expense in 1648. At the tsar's request the metropolitan of Kyiv sent learned monks to it in 1649; they formed a brotherhood that translated books and in 1652 opened a school.

Epiphany Slavinetsky had taught Greek and Latin in Kyiv. Called to Moscow in 1649 to prepare a new Bible, he lived at Rtishchev's monastery, compiled a Latin lexicon and translated, among much else, Vesalius's anatomy and Blaeu's cosmography. From 1653 Nikon set him to correcting the service books by the Greek.

In Pskov, grain bought up to pay Sweden for refugees from the lands ceded at Stolbovo sent prices soaring. The town rose in February 1650, and Gavriil Demidov, the elected town elder, headed its council, sharing out grain and goods taken from the rich and refusing the tsar's troops entry.

Prince Ivan Khovansky entered rebellious Novgorod without a fight on 13 April 1650, then besieged Pskov for more than three months without taking it. An assembly of the land promised concessions, a delegation under the bishop of Kolomna talked the city round, and in late August the voivodes' rule returned; in October the leaders were arrested and exiled.

Semyon Dezhnev, a service Cossack collecting fur tribute on the Kolyma, joined the trading voyage of Fedot Alekseyev Popov, a Moscow merchant's agent. In June 1648 their boats sailed down the Kolyma and east along the Arctic coast, rounding the north-eastern tip of Asia. Dezhnev was wrecked south of it and reached the Anadyr; his report lay forgotten for nearly a century.

Yerofey Khabarov, a frontier trader, set out at his own expense for the Amur in 1649, and the Yakutsk voivode Dmitry Frantsbekov sent him back with more men in 1650. His band seized Daur towns and took tribute by force, and at Achansk in March 1652 beat off an attack from the Qing garrison at Ninguta. In 1653 an envoy from Moscow stripped him of command and took him to Moscow for trial.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a Cossack officer whose estate had been seized by a Polish official, raised the Zaporozhians in 1648. With Crimean cavalry he destroyed the Crown army, and a Cossack state took shape in Ukraine; his Cossacks also massacred tens of thousands of Poles and Jews. He asked the Orthodox tsar for protection, but Moscow, wary of war with Poland, held back.

Islam III Giray, khan of Crimea since 1644, sent the horsemen who won Khmelnytsky's first battles. But he fought for Crimea's own interests: he helped win at Zboriv in 1649 and then made peace with the king, and at Berestechko in 1651 his Tatars fled the field, taking Khmelnytsky with them as a hostage.

Ivan Bohun, a Cossack colonel, took command of the camp at Berestechko on 9 July 1651, after the khan fled with the hetman. He had bridges laid across the marsh and led part of the army out before the Poles overran the camp, and he remained one of the Host's leading commanders.

Mikołaj Potocki, grand hetman of the Crown, marched against the rising in 1648 in defiance of the king's orders. At Korsun in May his army was destroyed, and he and the field hetman were taken prisoner.

Władysław IV died in May 1648, in the middle of the crisis, and his brother John Casimir was elected king. He alternated talks and war with the Cossacks, and in 1651 beat Khmelnytsky at Berestechko, cutting back the gains of the first years.

Janusz Radziwiłł, son of the Krzysztof who had harried Shein before Smolensk, led the Lithuanian army against the Cossacks, winning at Loyew in 1649 and again in 1651, and on 4 August 1651 took Kyiv. Squeezed from the north and west, Khmelnytsky pressed his appeals to Moscow harder.

Paisios, patriarch of Jerusalem, came to Moscow in January 1649, travelling with Khmelnytsky's envoy, and vouched for the hetman's intentions to the tsar. That March he consecrated Nikon metropolitan of Novgorod, and he gave Nikon a model of the Holy Sepulchre that inspired his New Jerusalem monastery.

Arseny Sukhanov, a monk-diplomat, left Moscow with Paisios in June 1649 to describe Greek church practice. He argued with the Greeks in defence of Russian usages and wrote the debates up for the Ambassadorial Office. Back in 1653, he was sent by Nikon to Mount Athos and the East to buy Greek manuscripts for the correction of the books.

Joseph died in April 1652, and Alexei made Nikon patriarch after Nikon had him promise obedience in matters of faith. Before Lent in 1653 Nikon ordered the faithful to cross themselves with three fingers instead of two, and a council in 1654 began correcting the books by the Greek.

Ivan Neronov, archpriest of the Kazan Cathedral on Red Square and Avvakum's friend, protested against the changes. A council sent him into exile in 1653, from one northern monastery to another. Unlike Avvakum, he made his peace with Nikon in 1657.

Avvakum refused the new rite and preached against it. In September 1653 he was thrown into a cellar of the Andronikov Monastery; the tsar intervened for him, and he was exiled with his family to Tobolsk, then sent further east to Dauria with the voivode Afanasy Pashkov, who treated him brutally.

Paul, whom Nikon had himself consecrated bishop of Kolomna in October 1652, objected at the council of 1654. Nikon deposed him on his own authority, had him mistreated and sent him into exile, where he died. The quarrel had reached the bishops.

In 1653, fearing that the Cossacks would turn to the Ottomans, Moscow resolved to act, and in October an assembly of the land agreed to take the Zaporozhian Host under the tsar. Almaz Ivanov, newly made head of the Ambassadorial Office, announced the decision to the hetman's envoys on 4 October and ran the diplomacy that followed.

Boyar Vasily Buturlin led the embassy that received the Host's oath at Pereiaslav in January 1654. The Cossack officers asked him to swear in the tsar's name that their liberties would be kept; he refused, saying a tsar did not swear to his subjects, and left their rights to later negotiation.

Pavlo Teteria, colonel of Pereiaslav, went to Moscow in March 1654 with the general judge Samiilo Bohdanovych-Zarudny. The articles they brought back kept the Host's own army, courts and revenues under the tsar's overlordship; what each side meant by them stayed in dispute.

Ivan Zolotarenko, colonel of Nizhyn and Khmelnytsky's acting hetman in the north, led about twenty thousand Cossacks into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1654, took Gomel and other towns, and in 1655 helped take Minsk and Vilnius. His men claimed districts the tsar's voivodes also claimed, and were notorious for cruelty. He was killed besieging Stary Bykhov in October 1655.

War with Poland followed the oath. Prince Yakov Cherkassky, first commander of the main army that marched west with the tsar in May 1654, was sent against Janusz Radziwiłł; he took Orsha and in August beat the Lithuanians at Shklov.

Prince Alexei Trubetskoy, cousin of the Dmitry Trubetskoy of 1612, led the south-western army out of Bryansk. On 24 August 1654 he routed Radziwiłł at Shepelevichi, which broke Lithuania's field army and sealed the fate of Smolensk.

Leslie had been rehired in 1647; accused in 1652 of mocking Orthodox rites, he was arrested and then, at the urging of the tsar and Ilya Miloslavsky, baptised Orthodox as Avraam. Now the first general in Russian service, he directed the siege of Smolensk at the tsar's side; the city surrendered on 23 September 1654, and he became its voivode.

Macarius III, patriarch of Antioch, reached Moscow in 1655 with his son and stayed until May 1656, while the tsar campaigned and Nikon governed in Moscow. At councils in 1655 and 1656 he backed Nikon's reforms and anathematised those who crossed themselves with two fingers.

Paul of Aleppo, Macarius's son and archdeacon, kept an Arabic account of the journey through Cossack Ukraine and Russia: its churches and endless services, the tsar's court and the patriarch's power. It gives one of the fullest outside views of Alexei's Russia.

Charles X Gustav became king of Sweden when Queen Christina abdicated in 1654, and in July 1655 invaded Poland, taking Warsaw and Kraków within months. A Commonwealth collapsing into Swedish hands threatened everything Moscow hoped to win in Lithuania and on the Baltic.

Beaten by the Russians and with Vilnius lost in August 1655, Janusz Radziwiłł signed a treaty at Kėdainiai putting the Grand Duchy under Swedish protection, and in October a union breaking it from Poland. Most Lithuanian nobles turned against him, and he died besieged at Tykocin on the last day of 1655.

Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, son of the Jacob who had fought beside Skopin-Shuisky, was governor-general of Livonia again from 1655. He negotiated the Kėdainiai union with the Lithuanian lords, and in 1656 he commanded at Riga against the Russians.

Alexei feared a Swedish Baltic more than a broken Poland. Halting the war with the Poles, he marched on Riga himself and besieged it from August 1656, but without ships he could not stop supplies reaching it by sea, and in October he withdrew. The truce with Poland was signed at Vilnius that November.

Afanasy Ordin-Nashchokin, a Pskov nobleman whose handling of the 1650 rising had caught the tsar's eye, governed captured Kokenhusen on the Daugava and in 1657 took Marienburg. On 20 December 1658 he signed the truce of Valiesar, letting Russia keep its Livonian conquests for three years, and was made a Duma noble.

Simeon, a monk teaching at the Orthodox brotherhood school in Polotsk, which Russian troops had taken in 1654, greeted Alexei with verses of his own when the tsar passed through in 1656. It was his first contact with the court that would later bring him to Moscow as a teacher and court poet.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky died in August 1657, having tried to secure the succession for his son Yurii. The officers chose instead his general chancellor, Ivan Vyhovsky, a nobleman who had run the hetman's chancery and diplomacy. The new hetman faced opponents at home and growing friction with Moscow, and looked to the Commonwealth.

Martyn Pushkar, colonel of Poltava and himself a candidate for hetman, rose against Vyhovsky in 1657 with the Zaporozhian leader Yakiv Barabash, both looking to the tsar. Vyhovsky brought in Crimean Tatars, and on 1 June 1658 Pushkar was killed in battle near Poltava; Barabash was later caught and executed.

Yurii Nemyrych, a magnate from the Kyiv lands and a former Polish Brethren who had turned Orthodox, drafted with Vyhovsky and Teteria the Treaty of Hadiach, signed on 16 September 1658. Ukraine was to rejoin the Commonwealth as a third member, the Grand Duchy of Rus', with Nemyrych as its chancellor.

Nikon had grown used to ruling in the tsar's absence, and Alexei himself had called him great sovereign. By 1658 Nikon's enemies had convinced the tsar that the patriarch was eclipsing him. On 10 July Nikon publicly laid down his office in the Dormition Cathedral and withdrew to his New Jerusalem monastery, without resigning his rank.

Pitirim, whom Nikon had made metropolitan of Krutitsy in 1655, took over the patriarch's routine duties without the title of locum tenens. The reforms went on under him; the old rite was not restored, and Nikon still claimed his see.

Onufriy Stepanov took over the Amur Cossacks when Khabarov was taken away in 1653. Short of grain, his men sailed the Amur and Sungari seizing food and tribute; in 1655 they held their fort at Kumara against a Qing army, but the river peoples fled the valley rather than feed them.

Šarhūda, a Manchu veteran of the conquest of China, had commanded the Qing garrison at Ninguta since 1652. In July 1658, below the mouth of the Sungari, his fleet of some forty boats trapped Stepanov's eleven. Stepanov was killed and most of his boats burned or taken; the Amur valley was clear of Russians until 1669.

Shin Ryu, a Joseon officer from the northern border, led some two hundred Korean musketeers on Šarhūda's campaign at the Qing court's request. His diary of the northern expedition records the battle. Afterwards Šarhūda refused the Koreans a share of the three hundred captured Russian guns.

Moscow answered Hadiach with war. In spring 1659 Prince Alexei Trubetskoy led the main southern army into Ukraine and besieged Vyhovsky's fortress of Konotop, but could not take it.

Mehmed IV Giray, Islam III's brother and khan again since 1654, had allied with the Commonwealth once Moscow took the Cossacks under its wing. In summer 1659 he led some thirty thousand riders to Konotop to fight beside Vyhovsky.

Prince Semyon Pozharsky, son of the Roman Pozharsky who had secured Yaroslavl for the 1612 militia, led Trubetskoy's cavalry after Vyhovsky's feint across the Sosnivka on 28 June. Cossacks took the bridge behind him, the khan's horsemen closed in, and on 29 June his force was destroyed. Captured, he was beheaded before the khan.

Konotop forced Trubetskoy to lift the siege and retreat, but the victory did not hold the Host together. The Sejm had ratified Hadiach in May only in a watered-down form, the left-bank regiments stayed loyal to Moscow, and Nemyrych was killed by his own Cossacks. In October 1659 Vyhovsky resigned and fled to Poland.

The Cossacks chose Bohdan's son Yurii, seventeen, for his father's name. Surrounded at Pereiaslav by Trubetskoy's army, he signed new Pereiaslav Articles on 27 October 1659: Russian voivodes and garrisons in five more Ukrainian towns, and no foreign dealings or wars without the tsar's consent.

Prince Ivan Andreyevich Khovansky, not the Ivan Khovansky who had besieged Pskov, commanded the Novgorod army in Lithuania. In 1660 he was besieging Lyakhavichy, a castle of the Sapieha family, when the war with Sweden ended in the west.

Paweł Jan Sapieha, son of the Jan Piotr who had besieged the Trinity monastery for the second Dmitry, had been grand hetman of Lithuania since 1656 and held Lyakhavichy among his estates. The Peace of Oliva, signed for Sweden by Magnus De la Gardie in May 1660, freed Commonwealth troops, and he marched against Khovansky.

Stefan Czarniecki, a veteran of the war against Sweden and made voivode of Ruthenia that year, brought Polish units to join Sapieha. In late June 1660 at Polonka their hussars caught Khovansky's army in an ambush and routed it; Khovansky escaped with a few horsemen, and the siege of Lyakhavichy was abandoned.

Vasily Sheremetev, voivode of Kyiv, led a Russian army into Volhynia in August 1660, counting on Yurii Khmelnytsky's Cossacks to join him. He advanced with poor scouting, expecting a weak enemy, and in September was caught near Liubar by a far larger Polish and Tatar force.

Stanisław Potocki, grand hetman of the Crown since 1654, with Lubomirski and the Crimean Tatars, pinned Sheremetev's army in its fortified camp near Chudniv, helped by Vyhovsky's spies.

Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski, Crown field hetman and grand marshal, took eight thousand men to stop Yurii Khmelnytsky's army from reaching Sheremetev and met it near Slobodyshche in early October. Some historians think the fight there was staged: Yurii had no wish to rescue Sheremetev.

On 17 October 1660 Yurii signed a treaty with the Poles, drafted with Teteria's help, returning the Host to the Commonwealth. Sheremetev, left alone, surrendered in early November; the Tatars took his whole army captive, and he spent twenty-one years in the Crimea.

In February 1660 a church council met to replace Nikon, whose see had stood empty for nearly two years, and ruled that he had forfeited even his priesthood. Epiphany Slavinetsky protested that Russian bishops could not judge their own patriarch; the tsar would not enforce a verdict of doubtful validity, and the case stayed open.