One of the first rulers of the Moscow state, the mother of the most formidable tsars, Elena Glinskaya managed to stay on the throne quite a bit - and yet she became a legend in Russian history.
Little Grand Duke Ivan Vasilyevich became an orphan at the age of eight. He hated his new regents, boyars, and for good reason. Firstly, they literally mocked the boy, forgot to take care of his food, locked him in the ward and mocked him. Secondly, Ivan Vasilievich was childishly sure that his mother had been poisoned. These suspicions were also mocked.
However, a few hundred years later, scientists opened the remains of Grand Duchess Elena and, after examining them, discovered: someone really poisoned the young woman with mercury salts. The main suspects in the murder are the Shuisky boyars. They had both motive and opportunity. Nothing new or unusual: the elimination of the main political enemy.
Mamaia's great-granddaughter
The Glinskys - the family in which Elena was born - raised their clan to Mamai himself. There is no evidence of this; rather, the Glinskys invented this legend for its importance. After the ancient Russian principalities lived in the Golden Horde, kinship with the khans was a prestigious affair.
Elena's parents were not ordinary people. Mother, Anna Yakshich, openly engaged in fortune-telling, despite the condemnation of the church and the people. Elena was her only daughter, the sister of three brothers - as in a fairy tale. Elena's father was Prince Vasily Glinsky, a wealthy man who spent six years as a stolnik in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He was kind to his family, he didn’t turn off his wife or daughter: his wife felt at ease, the red-haired daughter grew up wayward - by the standards of her time, of course.
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Moreover, Mikhail Glinsky's character was tough and hot. A knight by birth and upbringing, who managed to serve both in German lands and in Polish, wherever he appeared, sooner or later he would bully some other proud man. He moved to the service and to Moscow, after a quarrel with the Polish masters and the murder of one of them, and his brother and wife moved with him. So Elena was born a Muscovite.
At home Elena had European customs, which affected both the manners and the education of the girl. She was unusual in appearance: tall, slender, with curly red hair, with regular and soft features. It is not surprising that Grand Duke Vasily Ivanovich paid attention to her. He had just sent his first wife to the monastery - she could not bear to give birth to his son.
Soon the streets of Moscow were flooded with shaved faces - the capital's fashionistas tried to imitate the tsar. This angered the churchmen: they branded the shaven-faced, dissolute youth, trying to turn young men away from shaving with hints that the fashion was sodomite! But fashionistas, of course, did not blow their mustache.
The widow of the prince, the mother of the prince - the princess
Problems, apparently, were still in Vasily, and not in his previous wife: Elena still did not get pregnant, no matter how many monasteries the young people visited and no matter how sacred they observed the fasts. Finally, one by one, Elena gave birth to two boys: Ivan and Yuri (who would later turn out to be mentally retarded). Much later they gossiped: they say, the boys look like their mother, but not a bit like their father, so is that the same father? But the reconstruction of his appearance shows how Ivan Vasilyevich looks like his Byzantine paternal grandmother, and doubts have disappeared completely in our time.
Elena Glinskaya and Vasily III.
Alas, Vasily did not have a chance to rejoice at paternity for a long time: he soon died from a strange wound on his thigh (in which one of the last metastases of cancer is now assumed). He managed to declare his son Ivan his heir, and under him appoint seven regents. But Elena Glinskaya did not intend to yield to the dense and rude boyars. A quiet war began in the Kremlin.
And there were enough applicants - first of all, the brothers of the deceased. One of them, Yuri, tried to spread a rumor that the princess, they say, forced him to give the oath to the little prince Ivan Vasilyevich. For sedition, Elena immediately threw him in prison. He died of hunger there two years later. The princess's uncle also added to the problems. No one knows how his own niece stuck the old proud man, but he suddenly began everywhere and everywhere to discuss the new love of Elena, the young Obolensky.
One after another, the boyars from the regency council ended up in prison, and not from scratch - they conspired against the red-haired upstart, and Elena showed the family's toughness of character. Two of the regents fled from her to Lithuania. Another brother of Vasily ran into the prison from scratch: he demanded new lands from Elena. She did not consider it necessary to scatter the lands, gave her brother-in-law rich gifts and offered to calm down on that. He did not calm down - he began to honestly honor her in public.
She managed to end the Polish-Lithuanian war with an armistice for five years - moreover, in fact, the peace concluded on her terms lasted much longer. To this end, Glinskaya conducted difficult negotiations with the Swedes, convincing them not to help the Livonian Order in Lithuania. In the east, the Kazan Tatars began to plunder the Kostroma lands, but it was impossible to send an army there: the Crimean Khan openly declared that then his troops would approach Moscow, which was left without defenders.
Tsar Ivan the Terrible, son of Elena Glinskaya.
Elena solved this problem by consistently improving the fortifications of large Russian cities; was surrounded by a fortress wall and Kitay-gorod in Moscow. She fought the counterfeiters who undermined the economy of the state in the most severe way. Received and distributed three hundred families of Russian refugees from Lithuania, distributing them to live in different cities and assigning for the first time an allowance from the treasury.
Historians did not call any of these cases great, but one cannot but agree that in daily politics Elena proved to be a strong statesman, and who knows how else she would have unfolded if not for the poisoning.
Sergey Petrov
