Overview
Count Fyodor Alexeyevich Golovin (; 1650 – ) was the last Russian boyar and the first Chancellor of the Russian Empire. He was also a field marshal, and general admiral (1700).
Biography
Golovin descended from a family of Russian treasurers of Byzantine Greek descent.
Military career
During the regency of Sophia Alekseyevna, sister of Peter the Great, Golovin was sent to the Amur to defend the new fortress of Albazin against the Chinese Qing Empire. In 1689, he was the Tsardom of Russia's signatory to the Treaty of Nerchinsk between the Tsardom and the Qing Empire, by which the line of the Amur, as far as its tributary the Gorbitsa, was retroceded to China because of the impossibility of seriously defending it.
In Peter the Great's Grand Embassy to the West in 1697, Golovin occupied the second place immediately after Franz Lefort. It was his chief duty to hire foreign sailors and obtain everything necessary for the construction and complete equipment of a fleet. On Lefort's death in March 1699, he succeeded him as Field Marshal, and during that same year he was granted the title as the first Russian Count and was also the first to be decorated with the newly instituted Russian Order of St. Andrew.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).