The Early Romanovs and Peter the Great's Forging of the Empire

The first Romanov tsars focused on rebuilding the state after the devastation of the Time of Troubles. Alexis I (1645–1676) promulgated the Sobornoye Ulozhenie of 1649, a legal code that definitively consolidated Russian serfdom by permanently binding peasants to the land, and his reign also saw the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon, which split the Russian Orthodox Church between reformists and the traditionalist "Old Believers" in a schism known as the Raskol. Russian expansion continued in parallel: Cossack adventurers led by Yermak Timofeyevich, financed by the Stroganov merchant family, began the conquest of Siberia in 1581–1582, and fur hunters and fortified trading posts pushed the frontier all the way to the Pacific within barely six decades, formalized in the east by the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Qing China in 1689.