Feodor I Ioannovich (Russian: Феодор I Иoаннович) or Fyodor I Ivanovich (Russian: Фёдор I Иванович; 31 May 1557 – 17 January 1598), nicknamed the Blessed (Блаженный), was Tsar of all Russia from 1584 until his death in 1598.
Feodor's mother died when he was three, and he grew up in the shadow of his father, Ivan the Terrible. He was a pious man of retiring disposition and possibly suffered from mental disability. He took little interest in politics, and the country was effectively administered in his name by Boris Godunov, the brother of his beloved wife Irina. He died without surviving children and was succeeded by Godunov as tsar, marking the end of the rule of the Rurik dynasty and spurring Russia's descent into the catastrophic Time of Troubles.
He is listed in the Great Synaxaristes of the Eastern Orthodox Church, with his feast day on 7 January (O.S.).
Feodor was born on 31 May 1557 in Moscow, the third son of Ivan the Terrible by his first wife Anastasia Romanovna. He was baptized at the Chudov Monastery and his godfather was Macarius, the metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church. Although he was the sixth and youngest child of his mother, he grew up with only one older brother, Ivan Ivanovich, because all his other older siblings had died in infancy. His mother also died by the time Feodor was three years old, and her death greatly affected his father, who had been very attached to his wife. He also took a series of other wives, but Feodor's only surviving half-sibling, Dmitry of Uglich, was born on 19 October 1582 to the tsar's last wife.
Feodor therefore grew up in the shadow of a distant father, with no mother to succor him, and only his older brother Ivan Ivanovich for family solidarity. He grew to be sickly of health and diffident of temperament. He was extremely pious by nature, spending hours in prayer and contemplation. He was very fond of visiting churches, and would often cause the bells to be rung according to a special tradition in the Russian Orthodox Church. For this reason, he is known to history as Feodor the Bellringer. He is also listed in the Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church, with his feast day on 7 January (O.S.).
In May 1562, as Ivan IV went on a campaign against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, he left both tsareviches in Moscow and ordered Ivan Ivanovich “to write in his name to the commanders in all the towns about taking care of things and ordered all affairs of the land to his son Tsarevich Ivan". Upon his return in the autumn, the two tsareviches met the tsar on the Arbat, along with the metropolitan. During the next military campaign in the following year, the two sons were not given any formal responsibilities, and at the end of 1564, Ivan IV took his sons with him in the procession to Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, where he would stay for most of the remainder of his reign. In 1577, Feodor was left by his father in Novgorod with the boyars Dmitry and Boris Godunov and others, including a tutor.
Feodor did not play any role in foreign affairs, whereas his brother is mentioned as a participant in military campaigns and political discussions in razriady every year from 1567 until his death. Despite this, Feodor was selected as a candidate for the Polish throne in 1572–1573 and 1574–1576, besides his father himself. Feodor and his brother were not given a new title by their father, and in August 1581, the papal envoy in Russia, Antonio Possevino, was ordered to be told by the tsar that Russian documents did not need to be written in the name of both the tsar and the tsareviches because "my son Ivan has not yet been honored with the name of sovereign and my son Fyodor has not attained the age when he can rule the state with us". In the testament of Ivan IV, which has only survived in an 18th-century copy and is dated by historians to the 1570s, Feodor's brother was blessed with the tsardom along with most of the tsar's personal domain, with Feodor being given an appanage; however, the testament lost its validity following the sudden death of Ivan Ivanovich.
On 9 November 1581, Ivan Ivanovich died, with Antonio Possevino asserting in his 1586 book that he had been killed by his father in a fit of rage. His death left only Feodor and Dmitry as the remaining sons of the tsar. Feodor became tsar not only because of his brother's death, but also because his brother did not have any children, despite being married three times. He lived very differently to his elder brother due to his physical weakness and possible mental deficiencies. According to the metropolitan, Feodor was blessed by his father to succeed him, "to be anointed and crowned with that crown and diadem of the tsars ... [as] your father's heritor [otchichem] and your grandfather's heritor [dedichem] and the heir [naslednik] of the Russian tsardom".
In the spring of 1583, Feodor accompanied his father's army on a military campaign against rebels around Kazan, along with two dyadki (servants). The two were not important boyars, but the first one belonged to the clan of Boris Godunov and would achieve the rank of boyar and dvoretsky shortly after Feodor ascended the throne, while the second one was another supporter of the Godunovs who would be promoted from dumny dvoryanin to okolnichy in 1586. Around the same time, Ivan IV was looking for his eighth wife in England and consulted his physician Robert Jacob about relatives of Queen Elizabeth I who would be suitable. Jacob suggested Lady Mary Hastings, and Ivan told Elizabeth that if the two were to have sons, they would be given appanages "according to their sovereign rank" (po ikh gosudarskomu chinu) and be treated "equally in degree with Fyodor" (v rovenstve po stepeni so tsarevichem Fedorom). However, the plan did not go anywhere.
Ivan IV died on 28 March [O.S. 18 March] 1584, and Feodor succeeded his father as tsar. Two months later, on 31 May 1584, he was crowned as the tsar and autocrat of all Russia at the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. The coronation of Feodor was slightly modified to account for his father's recent conquests and the increasingly Byzantine practice of the tsar's court. As Feodor was Ivan's third son, the speechmakers for the coronation omitted the mention of "first" or "firstborn" in reference to heredity, which in the record of the coronation of his father, it was stated that the ancient custom of Russian grand princes was to bestow the rulership on "their firstborn sons". As a result, Metropolitan Dionysius simply stated that "the tsars and grand princes gave the Tsardom and Grand Principality of Russia to their sons [synom svoim]".
Due to the only surviving testament of Ivan IV being outdated and there being no reference of another testament having been written, historians have debated whether there was an informal regency council or not. The historian Ruslan Skrynnikov attempted to prove that the Zemsky Sobor (assembly of the land) elected Feodor as tsar, while Aleksandr Zimin rejected the idea. Lev Cherepnin tried to prove that the assembly had met but Feodor was not elected as he was already recognized as the new tsar. The few contemporary Russian sources available do not state that an election took place, such as the Stoglav of the church council of 2 July 1584 which states that Feodor was placed on the throne "according to the blessing of his father... having taken up the scepter of the Russian tsardom". At his coronation, Feodor was also claimed to have said that his father gave him the title "Tsar and Grand Prince, inheritor from his father and grandfather of the Russian tsardom".
Foreign sources like the account by Jerome Bowes described Feodor's accession as normal and without any mention of a council. Another English source from Jerome Horsey described how the boyars "were appointed to settle and dispose his [Ivan the Terrible's] son Fyodor Ivanovich, having sworn one another, and all the nobility and officers whosoever" before a "parliament" met on 4 May. However, both of the English reports were published soon after the events, and therefore may contain omissions due to political reasons, while the originals have not survived. Polish and Vatican reports mention the expectation of an election taking place, due to Feodor's "madness", but the letter of the emissary Lew Sapieha tells how the Russian pristav shared the story of Feodor sitting on the throne according to the blessing of his father. Pontus De la Gardie, the Swedish viceroy of Livonia, wrote a letter on 16 April to the viceroy of Novgorod about prolonging the truce between Sweden and Russia, because he had learned that the tsar had died and "in his place they had elected as grand prince his son Fyodor to the rank of his father and crowned him". The answering letter did not correct the error about Feodor being elected and simply stated that "with God’s help according to the blessing of his father, his son our sovereign tsar and grand prince Fyodor Ivanovich came to rule his states".