The Lost Dynasty
Three hundred years of family business. Nineteen Emperors and Empresses ruling with elegance, charisma, intrigue and might. Starting with Mikhail, ending with Mikhail. Building palaces and conquering vast lands. Succeeding one after another to govern hunger and cold with hidden gold and huge power, given by the glory of God and the Church. The legacy of the Romanov Dynasty started in mysterious ways and was ended by dark means in the midst of new worlds.
It started in 1613 when Mikhail I, a 16-year-old boy, was elected as Emperor of Russia by an assembly of boyars, a traditional noble class of the time. Mikhail was the son of Feodor Nikitich Romanov (later crowned as Patriarch Filaret), and the grandson of Roman Zakharin-Yuriev, from whom the name came to existence. Mikhail was elected after the death of Ivan IV, the Terrible, who had killed his own son when his wife, Anastasia, was assassinated by the boyars. And Ivan’s youngest son, Feodor, died childless. Thus his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, was elected as Tsar in 1599 and did everything he could to keep the Romanovs away. This didn’t last long, because a wave of False Dmitriys, one after another, claiming to be Feodor’s children, took him down and restored the Dynasty.
Peter the Great
After Mikhail, came his son Alexis I, in 1645, and his grandson Feodor III, in 1676. Feodor died without children, bringing rise to a new conflict between the descent of Alexis and Peter, and his stepbrother and sister Ivan and Sofia. We’re talking about Peter the Great, who started the importation of European influence and colonizing lands in Siberia. He founded the great city of St. Petersburg. (That’s where the name comes from.) He was the first one to call himself Tsar of all Russia. At his death in 1725, the boyars elected his wife, Catherine I, to succeed him, and after her came a few children, nephews and grandchildren who ruled in the new era of Russia continuing the tradition of fashion, magnificent palaces and powerful conquests. Until Catherine II, widow of one of the grandsons of Peter and Catherine I, conspicuously appeared in the throne in 1762. It is said that the nobles and the church forced him to abdicate in her favor.
Catherine the Great
A series of new conspiracies were formed in order to obtain the throne involving lots of murder. Alexander I, grandson of Catherine, and his brother Nicholas I, finally regained the power for the dynasty in 1825. And then a new Alexander and a new Nicholas came along. As the last one came to power, a whole new world was arising around the globe and Russia was not prepared. Just as Nicholas II was not prepared to be a Tsar. And was not prepared to fight two external wars and one internal civil war, of which we’ve learned already. In the end, all the members of the family were killed by the revolutionary army of the Bolsheviks. Mikhail, Nicholas’ brother, ruled for a few hours before he was banished and also executed, the finale of the Dynasty of the Romanovs, that had finally came to an end.
Nicholas II
Visit our sources:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/coll/214.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov
There’s also a great series of documentaries about the dynasty: