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Physically robust and 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, creating a map of Russia. It is still preserved.. It was edited with some additions by Hessel Gerritsz in Amsterdam, in 1613, and reedited until 1665.
On the sudden death of Boris the sixteen-year-old was proclaimed tsar (13 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 11 June (N. S.) 1605 the envoys of Pseudo-Demetrius I (or False Dmitriy I) arrived at Moscow to demand his removal, and the letters which they read publicly in the Red Square decided his fate. A group of boyars, unwilling to swear allegiance to the new tsar, seized control of the Kremlin and arrested him.
On 10/20 June Feodor was strangled in his apartment, together with his mother. Officially, he was declared to have been poisoned, but the Swedish diplomat Peter Petreius stated that the bodies, which had been on public display, showed traces of a violent struggle. Although aged 16 at best, Feodor was known to be physically strong and agile and apparently it took four men to overpower him.