Up to the 17th century, the icon was little known outside Gorodets and Kostroma. After 1613, its fame spread when the adolescent Mikhail Romanov had been elected as the new Russian tsar. Romanov lived in Kostroma with his mother Ksenia, who had been forced by the regent Boris Godunov to "take the veil" (join a convent and withdraw from public life). At first the nun advised her only son to stay in Kostroma and decline the offer of the Monomakh's Cap, or the position of tsar. She noted that three previous tsars had been either murdered or disgraced. Ksenia blessed her son by giving him a copy of the "Feodorovskaya". She asked the icon to protect Mikhail and his royal descendants. The young tsar took a copy of the icon with him to Moscow, where it came to be regarded as the holy protectress of the Romanov dynasty.