IN March 1604, this Dmitry presented himself at Sigismund’s court. There, Jesuits taught him to submit to the Pope, Sigismund furnished him with some 3,500 Polish-Lithuanian troops, and Dmitry promised them Russia in return.
Tsar Boris despatched Peter Basmanov to repel Dmitry, but after Boris died suddenly in April 1605, Basmanov switched sides and brought Dmitry into Moscow as Ivan’s triumphant heir. Sensationally, dowager Queen Maria acknowledged him. Dmitry had Boris’s son and heir, Feodor, prudently strangled.
On July 21st, 1605, Tsar Dmitry was crowned in the Dormition Cathedral.* Then he brought over his Polish retinue, his Polish ways, and finally Marina,* his Polish wife, and set about making Russia a Polish and Papal land. Almost a year had passed, when suddenly the people of Moscow awoke as from a dream. Remembering their land, their heroes, and their Orthodox faith,* they slew the impostor on May 17th, 1606, leaving him a mangled corpse, cleared out the intruders, and gave the crown to Vasily Shuisky,* a Rurikid prince.
There the matter should have ended. But two years later, in the Spring of 1608, to everyone’s utter amazement Tsar Dmitry reappeared with a Polish army at Tushino, a few miles from Moscow.
* The coronation was conducted by Patriarch Ignatius, a Cretan bishop who had come to Russia as an envoy of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The previous Patriarch, Job, had refused to recognise Dmitry as Tsar, and been deposed. Ignatius had been one of Dmitry’s early supporters, and was moreover an enthusiastic ecumenist, keen for the Greek and Russian churches to follow Dmitry’s example and acknowledge the supreme headship of the Pope, a position known as Uniatism.
* Marina Mniszech (?1588-1614), a devout Roman Catholic, dedicated to bringing the Russian Orthodox Church under the control of the Pope. She was the daughter of powerful Polish nobleman Jerzy Mniszech (1548-1613), to whom Dmitry had promised a controlling interest in Veliky Novgorod and other wealthy Russian cities in return for his support. The marriage was solemnised in a Roman Catholic church in November 1605.
* Just as England’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1563) had recently declared that ‘the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England’, so too the Russian Church, as indeed it had done since the ninth century, flatly refused to recognise the Roman Church’s supposed authority over the world’s kings and bishops, whether in politics or belief. Several of Russia’s heroes had gained their hero status for resisting the Pope’s pursuit of Christian unity aided by Western military power: see for example The Trials of Alexander Nevsky.
* Vasily Shuisky (?1552-1612), Tsar of Russia from 1606 to 1610. Shuisky was the man who conducted the official inquiry into eight-year-old Dmitry’s death in 1591, and concluded that it was an accident. After ‘Dmitry’ took the crown in 1605, Shuisky backtracked and agreed that Godunov had ordered the bungled assassination; but as Dmitry’s star began to fall he emerged as a leading rebel.