Despite poor health from childhood, he managed to pass reforms on improving meritocracy within the civil and military state administration as well as founding the Slavic Greek Latin Academy.

Born in Moscow, Fyodor, as the eldest surviving son of Tsar Alexis and Maria Miloslavskaya, succeeded his father on the throne in 1676 at the age of fifteen.

On 28 July 1680 he married a noblewoman, Agaphia Simeonovna Grushevskaya (1663–1681), daughter of Simeon Feodorovich Grushevsky and of his wife Maria Ivanovna Zaborovskaya, and assumed the sceptre.

[citation needed] The Tsar founded the academy of sciences in the Zaikonospassky monastery, where competent professors were to teach everything not expressly forbidden by the Orthodox church – the syllabus included Slavonic, Greek, Latin and Polish.

[3] The most notable reform of Feodor III, made at the suggestion of Vasily Galitzine, involved the abolition in 1682 of the system of mestnichestvo, or "place priority", which had paralyzed the whole civil and military administration of Muscovy for generations.