The Stroganovs or Strogonovs (), French spelling: Stroganoff, were a family of highly successful Russian merchants, industrialists, landowners, and statesmen. From the time of Ivan the Terrible () they were the richest businessmen in the Tsardom of Russia. They financed the Russian conquest of Siberia (1580 onwards) and Prince Pozharsky's 1612 reconquest of Moscow from the Poles. The Stroganov School of icon-painting (late 16th and 17th centuries) takes its name from them. The most recent common ancestor of the family was Fyodor Lukich Stroganov (died 1497), a salt industrialist. His elder son, Vladimir, became the founder of a branch whose members eventually became state peasants; this lineage continues. The lineage from Fyodor Lukich Stroganov's youngest son, Anikey (1488–1570), died out in 1923. Anikey's descendants became members of the high Russian nobility under the first Romanovs (tsars from 1613 onwards). Origins There have been suggested several theories of this family's origins. It had been believed that the family's progenitor was a merchant in Veliky Novgorod. However, historian Andrey Vvedensky concluded in his research on the family's genealogy, that they should have been hailing from wealthy Pomor peasants (i.e. Russians from Russia's subarctic north, in the region of the White Sea). The family's earliest ancestor was named Spiridon; he lived during the rule of Duke Dmitry Donskoy and was mentioned in the 1390s. His grandson, Luka Kuzmich Stroganov, was a renter of royal properties in the region of the Northern Dvina; he is claimed to have redeemed Duke Vasily II of Moscow from Tatar imprisonment in 1445. His son, Fyodor Lukich Stroganov (d. 1497), the latest common ancestor of the family, settled in Solvychegodsk (also in the Russian north). He was a local salt industrialist and owner of properties in town, which he passed down to his elder son, Vladimir. He had two brothers, Semyon and Ivan, whose descendants are unknown. He also had six sons: Stefan, Joseph (Osip), Vladimir, Ivan nicknamed Vyshnyak, Afanasy and Anikey, and a daughter named Maura. In 1517, elder brothers, Stefan, Joseph and Vladimir Stroganov, received a wood and a salt mine in Ustyug district. Vladimir Stroganov's lineage is still continued in the direct male line. However, his descendants became state peasants. His youngest son, Anikey Fyodorovich Stroganov (1488–1570), was the progenitor of the ennobled lineage of the Stroganov family. This lineage is now extinct. He opened the salterns in 1515, which would later become a huge