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# Anastasia Koshkina and the Romanov and Godunov Claims to the Russian Throne
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/pretenziia-romanovykh-na-prestol-osnovyvalas-na-tom-chto-byla-takaia-devitsa-koshkina/
- Published: 2019-11-11T10:59:14.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:03:42.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Aristocracy, Monarchies, Mores

The Romanovs' claim to the throne rested on the fact that there once was a maiden Koshkina. It was not even a surname: at that time it would be more fitting to speak of by-names. And so there were the Koshkins-Romanovs, and accordingly Anastasia, or, as we would put it now, Anastasia Romanovna Koshkina, who married a tsar of the house of Rurik.

Anastasia Koshkina was lucky: she married the future Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian ruler crowned as Tsar of Rus'. Moreover, Anastasia was the first on the multimillion-strong list of Ivan IV's wives. Under church law one might marry three times: the first marriage was deemed lawful, the marriage of a widower, that is the second, was so-so, the third was almost lawful, and all the others were unlawful. And it was on this basis that the Romanovs in their day grounded their claims to the throne.

The marriage produced offspring, but of the children only Ivan Ivanovich and Fyodor Ivanovich survived. Ivan Ivanovich died in his prime of some illness, and his wife Elena Sheremeteva had one child, who died very early, whereupon she took the veil. With Fyodor matters were more interesting: he was married to Irina Godunova, the sister of the Boris known to us all, and Irina bore only one daughter, Feodosia, who died at once, and so the line of Ivan the Terrible came to an end.

It was, in fact, on the strength of such indirect kinship with a genuine Rurikid that Godunov laid claim to the throne.

Anastasia Koshkina's marital arrangement, strangely enough, recalls the situation that arose in England after the death of King Henry V, whose widow, Catherine of Valois, contracted a second, morganatic and secret, marriage with a certain threadbare, lowborn Tudor who was no dynast. Catherine bore Owen Tudor, it seems, six children, one of whom, Edmund, married a maiden of the house of Beaufort, related by blood to Henry IV, and Edmund's son became King Henry VII of England.

Who could have known that the Tudors would become rulers of England and the Romanovs rulers of Russia... Though claims founded on flimsy marital bonds are not so very rare in history.