Tsar Theodore Ii
TSAR THEODORE II (1580-1605), tsar of Russia, was the son of Tsar Boris Godunov and one of the daughters of MalyutaSkuratov, the infamous favourite of Ivan the Terrible. Passionately beloved by his father, he received the best available education for those days, and from childhood was initiated into all the minutiae of government, besides sitting regularly in the council and receiving the foreign envoys. He seems also to have been remarkably and precociously intelligent, and the first map of Russia by a native, still preserved, is by his hand. On the sudden death of Boris he was proclaimed tsar (13th of April 1605). Though his father had taken the precaution to surround him with powerful friends, he lived from the first moment of his reign in an atmosphere of treachery. On the 1st of July the envoys of Pseudo-Demetrius I. arrived at Moscow to demand his removal, and the letters which they read publicly in the Red Square decided his fate. On the xoth of July he was most foully murdered in his apartments in the Kreml.
See D. I. Ilovaisky, The Anarchical Period in the Realm of Moscovy (Rus.) (Moscow, 1894).
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
