As statesmanlike, and less objectionable, was the appointment of a patriarch to win over the clergy. Jeremiah, patriarch of Constantinople, was banished by the Turks and sought refuge in Rome. The Pope sent him to Moscow, hoping that the chief of their own church would influence the Russians to forward the amalgamation of the Greek and Roman churches. If not successful in this, it was hoped that the recountal of the patriarch's sufferings and indignities at the hands of infidels, might induce the Romans to make a league with Spain against the Turks. According to Giles Fletcher the Pope's emissaries did nothing more than inveigh against England; but with the destruction of the Spanish Armada all conceit of a Russo-Spanish league vanished. Godunov profited by Jeremiah's stay in Moscow. He induced him to consecrate the Metropolitan Job, patriarch of Moscow, and to this patriarchate that of Constantinople was subsequently added. Thus Moscow became indisputably the head of the Orthodox Church, by direct apostolic succession. The Tsar fell ill in 1597 and died in the Kremlin the following year, and his widow then at once retired to the Novo Devichi convent mourning her bereavement and blaming herself that through her the sovereign race had perished, for her only child, Theodosia, died in 1592, when but ten months old. The enmity the reigning princes had shown their own kindred, produced the unexpected result that there were now no legal heirs to the throne; the line of which Andrew Bogoloobski Dolgoruki was the founder, was extinct. The Tsar Theodore when on his death-bed said that God would provide the next Tsar, and refused to nominate a successor. The States' Council convened for the purpose of appointing a ruler, unanimously chose Boris Godunov. It was impossible that the throne could escape him. He hung back, wishful to have an expression of the desire of the people of Moscow, as well as of the delegates. The people required him. They went to the Novo Devichi convent, whither he had gone, begged him to accept the position to which he had been appointed; his sister "blessed him for the throne," and with great show of reluctance, he at last consented. In due course he was crowned; reigned wisely and well, but was not liked. A chronicler has it that "he presented to the poor in a vase of gold the blood of the innocents, he fed them with unholy alms." Those of his subjects who remembered the tyranny of Ivan should have blessed their elected ruler. They could not forget his Tartar origin: he was not of royal descent, was no Tsar. Nor could he win popularity. His first act was to conclude an honourable peace with Kazi Ghiree and the invading Tartars; his policy was to avoid war, that "there might be neither widows nor orphans of his making." Horsey wrote of him:--