and mounted a public procession to beseech him to take the position. Only then
did Boris, legitimized by mass consensus, take the role, affirming it with an
elaborate coronation. This was not a constitutional election, but affirmation
using a traditional practice of consultation. When Godunov died in 1605, however,
fellow boyar clans refused to accept his son’s accession and there ensued almost a
decade of struggle over the throne. Dynastic crisis opened the door to the“Time of
Troubles”: Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth invaded, Volga
Cossacks led peasant uprisings against the center, and the army was in disarray as
boyar leadership splintered.
It took until 1613 for elite factions to agree upon a successor while Russia
suffered all manner of attempts at establishing legitimate rule. Because legitimacy
had been solely associated with dynastic succession, the era was rife with pretenders.
Save for a few boyars who might have understood the Polish parliamentary system,
in Muscovy there was no political vocabulary of legitimacy other than dynastic
succession; thus, candidates underscored their real genealogical claim to the ruling
dynasty (Vasilii Shuiskii, for example), or“pretended”to be one of the Daniilo-
vichi. Pretenderism endured into the eighteenth century, evidence of how deeply
engrained was the ideology of patrimonial autocracy. In the Time of Troubles, a
defrocked Russian monk who garnered Polish support posed as Ivan IV’s son
Dmitrii and took the throne briefly (1605–6). Several other“false Dmitriis”and
other claimants of Daniilovich blood emerged in the chaos. After the First False
Dmitrii, Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii (1606–10) took the throne. He scrambled to legit-
imize his accession by issuing manifestos condemning his predecessor as a“heretic”
and imposter, citing his ancient princely heritage and claiming to have been
selected by all the people. In his manifestos he promised not to abuse power by
arresting without just cause and trial, a comment that some modern scholars take as
a constitutional limit but that others see as a promise to restore the traditional
consensus-based relationship with the boyar elite that had been destroyed in the
time of Ivan IV.
Shuiskii was deposed when a Polish army captured the Kremlin (he died in
Polish captivity and is buried near Warsaw). Between 1610 and 1612 boyar clans
negotiated with Polish King Sigismund Vasa regarding succession by him or his son
Władysław, also insisting on no arbitrary arrest or treatment of elites. Muscovite
armies expelled the Poles from Moscow in late 1612 before negotiations were
finalized, and the selection of Michael Romanov as the new tsar demonstrated the
traditional ideology at work—his succession was made legitimate by a claim of
dynastic heritage (he was the grand-nephew of Ivan IV’sfirst wife Anastasiia) and
by public consensus. Hundreds of representatives of the gentry, Cossacks, and
taxpaying townsmen were summoned to Moscow to select a tsar. Throughout
January and February 1613 delegates debated options, rejecting foreign candidates
and settling on Michael Romanov. Back-room politics undoubtedly played a role,
as this was a shrewd choice for the ruling elite. In selecting 16-year-old Michael
Romanov, whose boyar father had been forcibly tonsured by Boris Godunov and
was in exile in the Commonwealth in 1613, they expected a weak ruler. Again, all
this consultation was traditional affirmation, not constitutional power. Crowned in
150 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801