Starting in 1610, a new patriarch, Germogen
(ca. 1530–1612),
led a religious and national rally with the help of Kuzma Minin
(d. 1616), who was by trade a butcher; Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich
Pozharskii (1578–1642); and a zemskii sobor. By 1613,
these forces had saved Muscovy, and the roughly 500 delegates
of the zemskii sobor, after six weeks of debate, elected a
new tsar, the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov (r. 1613–45),
a member of an old boyar family who was to become the founder
of Russia’s second dynasty.