"Oh, you are heavy, Monomakh's hat!" - complained Pushkin's tsar Boris.
And he was right. Many impostors, illegal claimants to the thrones and simply curious pranksters have experienced the punishing power of the royal crowns.
SS Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, one of the founders of the Gestapo, adored his children.
“Once they wanted to play with a real royal crown,” write Czech journalists D. Hamsik and I. Prazhak. - Just think, what trifles! The loving Pope took them to Prague Castle, ordered the opening of St. Wenceslas Chapel in St. Vitus Cathedral and retrieve the Czech coronation regalia that were kept there.
Dad does not deny anything to his family. The boys played with the royal crown, and the pope, who can do much more than just desecrate the historical symbols of the enslaved country, tried to put the crown on his narrow skull …"
Retribution was not long in coming. On May 27, 1942, a group of Czech partisans on the outskirts of Prague fired at the official's Mercedes and then threw a bomb at him. Heydrich was unconscious in the hospital. Bomb fragments hit the body in many places. Pieces of the uniform and upholstery of the car seat were in the wounds. On the seventh day, general blood poisoning began, which led to death.
The Czech crown, which played a fatal role in the fate of the Gauleiter, is still kept in Prague's St. Vitus Cathedral, and any tourist can see it. According to legend, it belonged to the baptist of the Czech Republic, Prince Václav the Holy (907-935).
Originally it was a simple gold hoop with a bow topped with a cross. The crown acquired its present appearance in 1346, when the Czech King Charles IV (1316-1378) ordered it to be re-decorated for his coronation. During his reign, the construction of the magnificent St. Vitus Cathedral began on the site of a small church founded by St. Wenceslas.
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The history of British royal regalia can serve as a striking example of the fact that crowns do not like to be on unworthy heads and severely punish blasphemers.
In the history of England, there are many cases when one of the pretenders to the throne, having come to power, physically eliminated a rival, whose rights to the throne were higher - the murder of Prince Arthur of Breton by his uncle John Lackland in 1202, the murder of the sons of Edward IV by his brother Richard III. 1484 year.
And every time, the crown itself seemed to leave the usurper: it drowned along with other royal jewels and the treasury while crossing the Wash Bay in October 1216, a week before the death of John the Landless (he was either poisoned or poisoned), and rolled off the helmet of Richard III into a hawthorn bush at the Battle of Bosworth on August 22, 1485.
In 1399, King Henry IV of Lancaster ascended the English throne. He took possession of the crown illegally, overthrowing his predecessor Richard II Plantagenet and removing the entire senior branch of the royal house from the throne.
A participant in many knightly tournaments and crusades of the Teutonic Order in the Baltic States, Henry IV, who had never complained of health, fell ill with leprosy shortly after his coronation.
This illness in the Middle Ages was considered a divine punishment, and the king died after fifteen years of unthinkable torment.
The English crown was made under King Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), canonized in 1161.
She died twice: in 1216, under John Lackland, she drowned in the waters of Wash Bay, and in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, she was melted down by fanatical Puritans.
And twice stubborn British restored it and now show it to tourists in the Treasury of the Tower of London. She is taken to Westminster Abbey for coronation ceremonies.
The most famous Russian crown - the Monomakh hat, apparently also does not like to adorn the heads of those who have no rights to it. The fate of all the kings-usurpers of the period of Russian turmoil at the beginning of the 17th century, crowned with this crown, was tragic.
Boris Godunov, having reigned for seven years, was poisoned or was poisoned on April 1, 1605. His son and heir, sixteen-year-old Tsar Fyodor Borisovich, was killed by conspirators. For only eleven months, False Dmitry I (presumably Grigory Otrepiev), who took the Godunovs throne, reigned, who died in 1606 also as a result of a conspiracy.
The enemy and successor of False Dmitry I, Tsar Vasily Shuisky, was overthrown from the throne by his own boyars, tonsured a monk, put in a cage and sent to Krakow for the amusement of King Sigismund and the Polish gentry, where he died in 1612 from shame and hardship.
The sad fate of the "Tushino thief" False Dmitry II, who never even held the cap of Monomakh in his hands, but ordered to make a copy of it for himself, did not pass by the sad fate. In December 1610, near Kaluga, False Dmitry II was killed by his own guards, and in 1614 his four-year-old son Ivan was hanged.
The belief that the crown of the anointed of God is fatal to the unworthy was especially evident in the punishment applied to "self-proclaimed" kings. He was crowned with a red-hot iron tripod in 1358 after the defeat of Jacquerie, Guillaume Calle, the “king” of rebellious “Jacques” - a gang of marauders who perpetrated unthinkable atrocities in France during the Hundred Years War.
In 1514, in Hungary, another such "king", Gyorgy Dogu, was seated on a red-hot iron throne and crowned with a red-hot iron crown. The royal crown - the object of their desire - became for them a weapon of punishment.
On February 4, 1818, at the initiative of the famous Scottish writer Walter Scott, in the presence of a special commission, one of the halls of Edinburgh Castle was opened. In this room, since the conclusion of the union between England and Scotland in 1707, Scottish crown regalia have been kept, the fate of which has been shrouded in darkness for over a hundred years.
After the opening of the premises, it turned out that the regalia were completely intact. And the next day, the members of the commission brought their families to the castle to admire the crown jewels. During the examination, one of the young members of the commission, being in a playful mood, tried to place the Scottish crown on the head of one of the girls present.
He was stopped by Walter Scott's shout: "For God's sake, don't!" According to eyewitnesses, the writer's face was twisted with a grimace of genuine horror, he almost by force tore the crown out of the hands of a frightened member of the commission, and then apologized to him for a long time.
Probably, the young man just wanted to joke, but Walter Scott, a mystic and occultist (in addition to historical novels and poems, he wrote the treatise "On Demonology and Witchcraft"), he knew very well: no joke with royal crowns.
Genuine crowns are not theatrical props in which the actors portray kings and autocrats. Along with hymns, coats of arms and flags, they symbolize national statehood, and jokes about them are sacrilege, dangerous primarily for the joker himself.