Simeon was the son of Bek-Bulat, and a great-grandson of
Ahmed Khan bin Küchük. The first mention of Simeon is in the
Supplement to the Nikon Chronicle in 1561 when he came to Moscow in the entourage of his aunt,
Kochenei (baptized as Maria), when she married Ivan IV that year. The earliest evidence he was the khan of Qasim comes from a statement from the Russian ambassador to
Constantinople, Ivan Novosiltsev, to the Ottoman sultan
Selim II in 1570. Ivan IV appointed Simeon as the grand prince of all Russia, and styled himself merely as "Ivan of Moscow". Historians have a number of opinions concerning why Ivan did this. According to the most popular theory by contemporary diplomat
Giles Fletcher, the Elder, Ivan aimed to confiscate the land that belonged to monasteries without attracting the ire of the Church. Simeon issued the decrees of confiscation instead of Ivan, while Ivan pretended to disagree. During his one-year "rule" in the
Moscow Kremlin, Simeon married Anastasia Mstislavskaya, the great-great-granddaughter of
Ivan III. In September 1576, In 1585, Tsar
Feodor Ivanovich removed his title as grand prince of Tver and Torzhok, and confined him to his estate at Kushalov. In 1595, Simeon went blind. According to Jacques Margeret, Simeon blamed Spanish wine that
Boris Godunov sent him for his birthday. When Boris was elected tsar in 1598, he required those at the court to sign a loyalty oath, which prohibited them from recognizing Simeon as tsar or corresponding with him.
False Dmitry I required Simeon to be tonsured at the
Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, where he took the monastic name Stefan on 3 April 1606. When Vasilii Shuiskii was elected tsar, he ordered the elder Stefan taken to the Solovki Monastery on 29 May 1606. In 1612, as the result of a decree issued by Prince
Dmitry Pozharsky and "on the advice of all the land" (
Zemsky Sobor), Stefan was returned to the
Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery. Under Tsar
Mikhail Fedorovich, he returned to Moscow and resided in the
Simonov Monastery until he died in 1616. He was buried in the Simonov Monastery next to his wife, who had died on 7 June 1607, after having been veiled as the nun Alexandra. ==Ancestry==