Fyodor I

Fyodor I (born May 31, 1557, Moscow, Russia—died Jan. 7 [Jan. 17, New Style], 1598, Moscow) was the tsar of Russia (1584–98) whose death ended the rule of the Rurik dynasty in Russia.

The son of Ivan IV the Terrible and his first wife, Anastasiya Romanovna Zakharina-Yureva, Fyodor succeeded his father on March 19, 1584. Being both physically weak and feebleminded, however, he took no part in government affairs, which were dominated by his wife’s brother, Boris Godunov. Godunov was, therefore, responsible for the major achievements of Fyodor’s reign—the elevation of the metropolitan see of Russia to a patriarchate (1589), the recovery in 1595 of lands near the Gulf of Finland that had been lost to Sweden in 1583, and the strengthening of Russia’s control over western Siberia and territory in the Caucasus. When Fyodor died childless in 1598, the Rurik dynasty became extinct and the throne of Russia was transferred, by vote of a zemsky sobor (“assembly of the land”), to Godunov.