Romanov rule ended after 304 years in March 1917
The House of Romanov was Russia’s reigning imperial dynasty from Michael’s 1613 election after the Rurik line died with Feodor I. Peter I took the emperor title and proclaimed the Empire in 1721. Nicholas II’s abdication on 15 March 1917 (O.S. 2 March) closed 304 years of rule.
The family traced itself to Andrei Kobyla, a Moscow boyar recorded around 1347 and shared ancestor of some two dozen noble houses; a later genealogy dressed him up as the son of an Old Prussian prince. His son Feodor, nicknamed Koshka, or cat, began a line that passed through the surnames Koshkin and Zakharin before one branch settled on Romanov in the time of Ivan the Terrible.
Their rise came through marriage. In February 1547 Anastasia Zakharyina wed Ivan IV and became Russia’s first crowned tsaritsa; her death in 1560 soured Ivan into a terror against the boyars. When her pious son Feodor I died childless in 1598, the 700-year-old Rurik line ended and the Time of Troubles began. Boris Godunov won the throne, accused the Romanovs of treason and witchcraft in 1600, and exiled them to the far north; their leader Feodor Nikitich was forced to become the monk Filaret.
After Polish troops were driven from Moscow in 1612, an assembly chose Filaret’s 16-year-old son Mikhail as a compromise between Cossacks and nobles, acclaiming him on 13 February 1613. He reportedly wept with fear when offered the crown, then ruled cautiously by consulting assemblies and boyars. His son Alexei followed in 1645, and Peter the Great, ruling from 1682 to 1725, fought his way to great-power status and pushed a rationalist, European-facing culture.
The direct male line died with the childless Empress Elizabeth in 1762. Her nephew Peter III, from the German house of Holstein-Gottorp, took his Romanov mother’s name, so later rulers are sometimes styled Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Paul I became the first heir titled tsesarevich, a 1913 jubilee marked three hundred years of rule, and after February 1917 the Provisional Government formally assigned the Romanov surname to the imperial family.
Source: House of Romanov
