Russia's Most Quiet tsar reigned through riots, rebellion and a church split
Tsar Alexis earned the nickname Tishayshy, the Most Quiet, for his gentle manner, and he left behind letters and a charming set of instructions for his falconers. His three decades on the throne were anything but calm: a salt riot, a copper-coin riot, a Cossack uprising and a lasting split in the Russian church.
Alexis was born in Moscow on 19 March 1629, son of Michael, the first Romanov tsar, and inherited the throne at sixteen in 1645. His tutor, the Western-minded boyar Boris Morozov, ran affairs at first and arranged the young tsar's marriage to Maria Miloslavskaya in 1648, marrying her sister himself ten days later. Morozov's tax squeeze, including demands for two years of arrears, triggered the Salt Riot in Moscow that May, and Alexis had to send him away to a monastery.
The unrest helped produce a sweeping new law code in 1649, which bound the crown more tightly to the lower nobility. Alexis also rebuilt his army with new-style regiments of cavalry and infantry, hiring the many European officers left unemployed by the end of the Thirty Years War. Costly wars with Poland and Sweden drained the treasury, and a flood of copper coins minted from 1654 wrecked the ruble and set off the Copper Riot of 1662. In 1669 the Don Cossack Stenka Razin rose in revolt, capturing towns along the Volga before his defeat and capture in 1671.
In church affairs Alexis backed Patriarch Nikon, whose reforms brought Russian ritual into line with Greek practice, most visibly by requiring the sign of the cross with three fingers rather than two. Nikon walked out in 1658 after a personal slight, and a great synod in 1666 deposed him while excommunicating opponents of the reforms, who became the Old Believers.
When England beheaded Charles I in 1649, Alexis was outraged, cut off relations, expelled English merchants and sent money to the king's widow. He had a knack for spotting capable ministers such as Afanasy Ordin-Nashchokin and Artamon Matveyev. His doctor described him at 37 as tall, fat and majestic. By his death on 8 February 1676, Russia covered roughly 8.1 million square kilometres.
Source: Alexis of Russia
