The Time of Troubles
The Time of Troubles ran from 1598 to 1613 and nearly ended the Russian state. It began with a dynastic vacuum. Fyodor I died childless in 1598, ending the Rurikid line that had ruled for seven centuries, and an assembly elected Boris Godunov — an able administrator with no hereditary claim, which is precisely what made him vulnerable. A famine from 1601 to 1603, caused by crop failures now attributed to the eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru, killed perhaps two million people, a third of the population in some regions, and destroyed his legitimacy. Then came the pretenders. A man claiming to be Dmitry, Ivan the Terrible's youngest son who had died at Uglich in 1591, appeared in Poland, gathered backing from Polish magnates and Jesuits, and invaded in 1604. Godunov died suddenly in 1605, his son was murdered, and the False Dmitry entered Moscow and was crowned. He was killed within a year, his ashes fired from a cannon towards Poland. A second False Dmitry followed, then a third. Sweden intervened, then Poland invaded outright; Polish troops occupied the Kremlin from 1610, and a faction of boyars offered the throne to the Polish king's son. Cossack armies and peasant risings under Ivan Bolotnikov added a social war to the dynastic one. Recovery came from below. The merchant Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky raised a volunteer army at Nizhny Novgorod and retook Moscow in 1612. An assembly elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov in 1613. His family ruled until 1917. Poland kept Smolensk for another forty years. The period left Russia with a lasting fear of foreign intervention and a serfdom tightened to hold the peasantry on the land.
- Year: 1598 CE
- Category: Political
