Irina Godunova

Who was Irina Godunova?

Irina Feodorovna Godunova later Alexandra was the wife of Tsar Feodor I Ivanovich and the sister of Tsar Boris Godunov.

The precise dates of some of the events in Irina's life are uncertain; most sources indicate that she was picked by Ivan the Terrible to be the wife of the tsarevich Fedor in 1580 or 1581, although some sources say this occurred as early as 1574. At 23 or 24, she would have been considered old for a bride in Muscovy, where the common age for marriage was in the mid-teens, and it is not certain why she married so relatively late in life. She became Tsaritsa upon the coronation of her husband in 1584.

Throughout her husband's reign, she was expected to produce a male heir. Fedor was physically and mentally frail and, were he to die without male issue, it was questionable whether his half-brother, Dmitri, would be considered legitimate, as he was the result of Ivan the Terrible's seventh marriage and the Orthodox Church recognized only up to four marriages as legitimate. Indeed, even with Dmitri as a possible successor, Irina was under pressure to produce an heir and in 1585, she traveled to the Trinity-St. Sergei Monastery north of Moscow in hopes of a miraculous cure for her alleged infertility, but still she did not bear a child—a daughter, Feodosia Fedorovna—until 1592, but the girl did not live long and died in January 1594. The couple's continued infertility led to court intrigue. Thus, in 1585, Metropolitan Dionysius proposed that Fedor divorce Irina, blaming her for being infertile and arguing that, for the good of the state and the dynasty, the Tsar ought to remarry and produce a male heir. The suggestion was seen as an effort on the part of the Shuiskies and other boyar clans to undercut the Godunovs. In response, Boris Godunov had the metropolitan deposed and confined to the Khutyn Monastery just outside Novgorod the Great.