The House of Romanov (also transliterated as Romanoff; , ) was a royal house and the reigning imperial house of Tsarist Russia from 1613 until its deposition in 1917. They achieved prominence after Anastasia Romanovna married Ivan the Terrible, the first crowned tsar of all Russia. Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, and his immediate family were executed in 1918, but there are still living descendants of other members of the imperial house.
The house consisted of boyars in Russia (the highest rank in the Russian nobility at the time) under the reigning Rurik dynasty, which became extinct upon the death of Feodor I in 1598. The Time of Troubles, caused by the resulting succession crisis, saw several pretenders and impostors lay claim to the Russian throne during the Polish–Lithuanian occupation. On 21 February 1613, the Zemsky Sobor elected Michael Romanov as tsar, establishing the Romanovs as Russia's second reigning dynasty.
Michael's grandson, Peter I, who took the title of emperor and proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, transformed the country into a great power through a series of wars and reforms. The direct male line of the Romanovs ended when Elizabeth died childless in 1762. As a result, her nephew Peter III, an agnatic member of the House of Holstein-Gottorp (a cadet branch of the German House of Oldenburg), ascended to the throne and adopted his Romanov mother's house name.Montgomery-Massingberd, Hugh. "Burke's Royal Families of the World: Volume I Europe & Latin America, 1977, pp. 460–476. Officially known as members of the House of Romanov, descendants after Elizabeth are sometimes referred to as Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov.
Paul I became the first heir to the throne, having the title tsesarevich, which was subsequently used for all main heirs.
The abdication of Nicholas II on as a result of the February Revolution ended 304 years of Romanov rule and led to the establishment of the Russian Republic under the Russian Provisional Government in the lead-up to the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. In 1918, the Bolsheviks executed Nicholas II and his family. Of the House of Romanov's 65 members, 47 survivors went into exile abroad. In 1924, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, the senior surviving male-line descendant of Alexander II of Russia by primogeniture, claimed the headship of the defunct Imperial House of Russia.
Surname usage Legally, it remains unclear whether any ukase ever abolished the surname of Michael Romanov (or of his subsequent male-line descendants) after his accession to the Russian throne in 1613, although by tradition members of reigning dynasties seldom use surnames, being known instead by dynastic titles ("Tsarevich Ivan Alexeevich", "Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich", etc.). From , the monarchs of the Russian Empire claimed the throne as relatives of Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna of Russia (1708–1728), who had married Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Thus they were no longer Romanovs by patrilineage, belonging instead to the Holstein-Gottorp cadet branch of the German House of Oldenburg that reigned in Denmark. The 1944 edition of the Almanach de Gotha records the name of Russia's ruling dynasty from the time of Peter III (reigned 1761–1762) as "Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov". However, the terms "Romanov" and "House of Romanov" often occurred in official references to the Russian imperial family. The coat-of-arms of the Romanov boyars was included in legislation on the imperial dynasty,Compare . and in a 1913 jubilee, Russia officially celebrated the "300th Anniversary of the Romanovs' rule".
After the February Revolution of 1917, a special decree of the Provisional Government of Russia granted all members of the imperial family the surname "Romanov". The only exceptions, the morganatic descendants of the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (1891–1942), took (in exile) the surname Ilyinsky.
History Origins
The Romanovs share their origin with two dozen other Russian noble families. Their earliest common ancestor is one Andrei Kobyla, attested around 1347 as a boyar in the service of Simeon, the prince of Moscow and grand prince of Vladimir. Later generations assigned to Kobyla an illustrious pedigree. An 18th-century genealogy claimed that he was the son of the Old Prussian prince Glanda Kambila, who came to Russia in the second half of the 13th century, fleeing the invading Germans. Indeed, one of the leaders of the Old Prussian rebellion of 1260–1274 against the Teutonic order was named Glande. This legendary version of the Romanov's origin is contested by another version of descent from a boyar family from Novgorod.
One of Kobyla's sons, Feodor, a member of the boyar duma of Dmitry Donskoy, was nicknamed Koshka ("cat"). His descendants took the surname Koshkin, then changed it to Zakharin (descendants of Zakhary), which later split into two branches: Zakharin-Yakovlev (descendants of Yakov Zakharyevich) and Zakharin-Yuriev (descendants of Yuri Zakharyevich). During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the former became known as Yakovlev (Alexander Herzen among them), whereas the grandchildren of Roman Yurievich Zakharyin-Yuriev changed their name to "Romanov".
Feodor Nikitich Romanov was descended from the Rurik dynasty through the female line. His mother, Evdokiya Gorbataya-Shuyskaya, was a Rurikid princess from the Shuysky branch, daughter of Alexander Gorbatyi-Shuisky. A ninth generation ancestor of Michael I Romanov is Dimitri Konstantinovich.
Rise to power The family fortunes soared when Roman's daughter, Anastasia Zakharyina, married Ivan IV ("the Terrible") on 3 (13) February 1547. Since her husband had assumed the title of Tsar of all Russia, which derives from the title "Caesar", on 16 January 1547, she was crowned as the first tsaritsa of Russia. Her mysterious death in 1560 changed Ivan's character for the worse. Suspecting the boyars of having poisoned his beloved, Ivan launched a reign of terror against them. Among his children by Anastasia, the eldest, Ivan, was murdered by the tsar in a quarrel; the younger Feodor, a pious but lethargic prince, inherited the throne upon his father's death in 1584.
Throughout Feodor's reign (1584–1598), the tsar's brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, and his Romanov cousins contested the de facto rule of Russia. Upon the childless death of Feodor, the 700-year-old line of the Rurik dynasty came to an end, ushering in the Time of Troubles. After a long struggle, the party of Boris Godunov prevailed over the Romanovs, and the Zemsky Sobor elected Godunov as tsar in 1598. After a brief period of peace, in 1600 Godunov accused Feodor Nikitich Romanov, the family's leader, and his brothers of treason and witchcraft. Godunov's revenge on the Romanovs led to all the family and its relations being deported to remote corners of the Russian North and Urals, where most of them died of hunger or in chains. Feodor was exiled to the Antoniev Siysky Monastery and forced to take monastic vows with the name Filaret, while three of his brothers died, possibly assassinated by order of the tsar.
The Romanovs' fortunes again changed dramatically with the fall of the Godunov dynasty in June 1605. As a former leader of the anti-Godunov party and cousin of the last legitimate tsar, Filaret Romanov's recognition was sought by several impostors who attempted to claim the Rurikid legacy and throne during the Time of Troubles. False Dmitriy I made him a metropolitan of Rostov-on-Don, and False Dmitriy II raised him to the dignity of patriarch. His brother Ivan Romanov took part in the overthrow of Vasili IV of Russia.Montefiore, pag. 44 Upon the expulsion of the Polish army from Moscow in 1612, the Zemsky Sobor offered the Russian crown to several Rurikid and Gediminian princes, but all declined the honour. In the end, Filaret's 16-year-old son Mikhail Romanov, was chosen as a compromise candidate between the cossacks and the nobility, and was acclaimed tsar on 13 February 1613.Montefiore, pag. 46-47
On being offered the Russian crown Mikhail, then living at the Ipatiev Monastery of Kostroma, burst into tears of fear and despair. He was finally persuaded to accept the throne by the delegation sent by the Zemsky Sobor, and was crowned on 11 July.Montefiore, pag. 27-51 Feeling how insecure his throne was, Mikhail attempted to emphasize his ties with the last Rurikid tsars[An ancestor of Czar Mikhail I was Alexander Gorbatyi-Shuisky of a Rurikid princely house] and to reestablish the sacrality of the monarchy, and sought advice from the Zemsky Sobor and the boyars on every important issue. This strategy proved successful.Montefiore, pag. 53-55
Dynastic crises and Peter the Great
Mikhail was succeeded in 1645 by his only surviving son Alexei, who steered the country quietly through numerous troubles. Upon Alexei's death in 1676, there was a period of dynastic struggle between his children by his first wife Maria Ilyinichna Miloslavskaya (Feodor III, Sofia Alexeyevna, Ivan V) and his son by his second wife Nataliya Kyrillovna Naryshkina, the future Peter the Great. Peter ruled from 1682 until his death in 1725. In numerous successful wars he expanded the tsardom into a huge empire that became a major European power. He led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political system with a modern, scientific, Europe-oriented, and rationalist system.James Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great (Harvard University Press, 2003) online edition
New dynastic struggles followed the death of Peter. His only son to survive into adulthood, Tsarevich Alexei, did not support Peter's modernization of Russia. He had previously been arrested and died in prison shortly thereafter. Near the end of his life, Peter managed to alter the succession tradition of male heirs, allowing him to choose his heir. Power then passed into the hands of his second wife, Empress Catherine, who ruled until her death in 1727. Peter II, the son of Tsarevich Alexei, took the throne but died in 1730, ending the Romanov male line. He was succeeded by Anna I, daughter of Peter the Great's half-brother and co-ruler, Ivan V. Before she died in 1740 the empress declared that her grandnephew, Ivan VI, should succeed her. This was an attempt to secure the line of her father, while excluding descendants of Peter the Great from inheriting the throne. Ivan VI was only a one-year-old infant at the time of his succession to the throne, and his parents, Grand Duchess Anna Leopoldovna and Duke Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick, the ruling regent, were detested for their German counselors and relations. As a consequence, shortly after Empress Anna's death, Elizabeth Petrovna, a legitimized daughter of Peter I, managed to gain the favor of the populace and dethroned Ivan VI in a coup d'état, supported by the Preobrazhensky Regiment and the ambassadors of France and Sweden. Ivan VI was murdered in 1764 while imprisoned, and his parents died from illness during their captivity.Montefiore, pag. 229-266
Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov