Romanov Dynasty: Ipatiev Monastery to Ipatiev House, Aspirin and Rasputin

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The House of Romanov took the Russian throne in 1613, after the 700-year Rurik line died out and the Time of Troubles brought famine, Polish and Swedish occupation and pretenders marching on Moscow. When princes refused the crown, nobles offered it to 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov, hiding with his mother at the Ipatiev Monastery, and he burst into tears and begged them to leave. He survived by consulting the Zemsky Sobor on nearly every major issue. His grandson Peter the Great toured Western Europe, learned shipbuilding and built St. Petersburg on a swamp, but the male line ended with Empress Elizabeth in 1762, and Peter III and Catherine the Great made the house a Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov branch that kept the old name.

Paul I's laws imposed male-preference succession and equal-birth marriages, and the tsar drew 24 million gold rubles a year yet was often broke by autumn because state and family finances were one. Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861 and was killed by a bomb, and Alexander III answered with repression. Nicholas II, who admitted he knew nothing of ruling, married Alix of Hesse, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, whose son Alexei had hemophilia. The family hid the illness and turned to Grigori Rasputin, while the public saw a foreign empress taking advice from a mystic. Nicholas abdicated in 1917, and in July 1918 the family and four servants were shot in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg.

• The 1944 Almanach de Gotha listed the dynasty as Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov.
• Rasputin's success may have come from stopping the doctors' aspirin, a blood thinner that worsened Alexei's bleeding.
• Diamonds sewn into the daughters' clothing deflected bullets, and the killers finished with bayonets and rifle butts.
• The bodies were burned, doused with acid and buried in the forest because the approaching White Army might make them relics.
• Prince Philip's mitochondrial DNA matched the remains, a 2007 grave held Alexei and a sister, and Anna Anderson proved to be a Polish factory worker.