Dmitry the Pretender
Boris Godunov was crowned Tsar of All Russia in 1598 in the belief that Tsar Ivan’s son Dmitry was dead — but was he?
1604-1613
King James I 1603-1625
Boris Godunov was crowned Tsar of All Russia in 1598 in the belief that Tsar Ivan’s son Dmitry was dead — but was he?
1604-1613
King James I 1603-1625
In 1604, Tsar Boris of Russia faced almost exactly the same scenario that had confronted Henry VII of England in the 1490s: a young man claiming to be a prince everyone thought had died years before, marching on the capital with an army of rebellion. The chief difference was that in Russia’s agonised Time of Troubles, the impostor actually got to play King.
AFTER Ivan the Terrible died in 1584,* Boris Godunov* took responsibility for his surviving sons: sensitive Feodor, who now became Tsar at twenty-six,* and Feodor’s half-brother Dmitry, not yet two.* Dmitry died in mysterious circumstances seven years later. In 1598, Feodor also died, and Moscow’s National Assembly crowned Boris in his place, though he was not of Rurik’s royal blood.*
Boris was an able administrator, but recently had enacted a horrible law. Hitherto, Russian peasants had been free to sell their labour wherever they pleased. Godunov thought this destabilising, and copied his western neighbours by making each peasant a serf, doomed to farm one plot of land for one noble lord forever.* Revenues fell, emigration rose, fields lay untilled, peasants starved, and barns stood empty. Anger grew towards the upstart Godunov.
Amidst this unrest a young man appeared calling himself Prince Dmitry, Ivan’s youngest son. He was eight, he said, when his mother, dowager Queen Maria, foiled Godunov’s assassins, and another boy died in his place. Patriarch Job in Moscow liked him. Russia’s dissatisfied noblemen liked him. Most importantly, Sigismund III, King of Poland, liked him, and saw in him a rare opportunity.
* Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ was Grand Prince of Moscow (r. 1533-1547) and the first Tsar of all Russia (r. 1547-1584). He died on March 18th, 1584. For a similar but less successful imposture in the reign of England’s Henry VII, see Perkin Warbeck.
* Boris Godunov (1552-1605) was a close confidant of Ivan IV, a leading figure in his intelligence service, and an able administrator who (among other things) continued Ivan’s policy of encouraging English merchants by scrapping duty on their goods. See also Merchants of Muscovy.
* Feodor I Ivanovich (r. 1584-1598) was not physically strong nor was he a leader of men, but sensitive and deeply religious, happiest when in monasteries and churches. He would beg to hear their bells, and so he is also known as ‘the Bellringer’. Day-to-day administration was in the hands of Boris Godunov.
* Prince Dmitry of Moscow (1582-1591) was the son of Maria Nagaya, Ivan’s last wife, and hence Feodor’s half-brother. Dmitry’s death on May 15th, 1591, at the age of eight (his birthday was in October) was the subject of an official inquiry, which concluded that Dmitry had suffered a seizure while playing svaika, a popular throwing game involving a large and heavy spike, during which he accidentally pierced his own throat. Rumours flew of a cover-up, but on the whole modern scholars exonerate Godunov.
* Rurik was the Viking (Varangian) who settled Veliky Novgorod in the seventh century, and to whom generations of Princes of Moscow and Kiev, including Ivan IV, traced their descent. See Invitation to a Viking.
* Russian serfdom was finally abolished by Emperor Alexander III in 1861. Serfdom had died out in Britain and France by the fourteenth century, though it persisted in Prussia until 1807, Austria until 1848, and Poland until 1864. A few years after Godunov introduced serfdom in Russia, Britain followed Spain’s example and began tolerating slavery in her New World colonies, a wrong not righted until 1833. The USA tolerated slavery even on home soil until 1861. On Russia’s attitude to the slave trade, see True Colours.