YET again Dmitry had defied death! The mangled corpse of two years ago was not his, but a servant’s. The Tsar lived! At any rate, devoted Marina called him husband, and many Russians were convinced.* For nearly three years Russia had two Tsars, two Parliaments and two Patriarchs. Dmitry never won Veliky [Great] Novgorod, Kazan, Smolensk or Nizhny [Lower] Novgorod, but he controlled most of the rest.
In Moscow, a council of Seven Boyars elected Sigismund’s son Vladislav in place of Tsar Vasily, before opening the gates to the Polish army. Dmitry, now surplus to requirements, was murdered in December 1610, and Sigismund claimed Moscow for himself. Sweden meanwhile seized Veliky Novgorod, and everywhere was chaos.
At last the Church stepped in. The Trinity Monastery near Moscow, following a sixteen-month siege,* circulated a call to arms; and the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod, a butcher named Kuzma Minin, answered it. He collected a few men, and by the time they had reached Moscow they were an army. There they besieged the Poles, and in 1612 drove them out amid scenes of public joy. The following year, the National Assembly elected young Michael Romanov, just sixteen but of true royal blood, to be their Tsar.
* ‘Patriarch’ Ignatius, who had supported Dmitry in 1605-6, was another who spoke up for this Dmitry redux. He also established a rival Patriarchate in opposition to the canonical Patriarch, Hermogenes (in office 1606-1612). Ignatius eventually became an Eastern-rite Roman Catholic.
* The siege lasted from September 23rd, 1608, to January 12th, 1610.