On November 19, 1582, the son of Ivan the Terrible, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, died. This event became fatal for Russian history. And one of the most confusing.
Fatal intercession
One of the main versions of the murder of his son by Ivan the Terrible is known to us from the words of Antonio Possevino, the papal legate. According to this version, Ivan the Terrible found his son's wife, Elena, in an inappropriate state. Terrible's daughter-in-law was pregnant and lay in one underwear. Ivan IV got angry and began to "teach" Elena, hit her in the face and beat her with a staff. Then, according to the same Possevino, Ivan the Terrible's son ran into the wards and began to reproach his father with these words: “You imprisoned my first wife for no reason in a monastery, you did the same with your second wife and now you are beating the third in order to destroy your son, which she carries in her womb. " The final is known. The father's staff also took out his son, breaking his skull.
This version, which has become a textbook, is being criticized today. It was beneficial to make Ivan IV a ruthless filicide for at least two reasons: firstly, the Russian tsar appeared in an unseemly light, and secondly, such horrors, which were happening on the assurances of the same Possevino in Russia, legitimized the European Inquisition.
Political strife
According to another version, politics became the stumbling block between the son and the father. This version was voiced by Nikolai Karamzin in his History: “The Tsarevich, filled with noble jealousy, came to his father and demanded that he send him with an army to expel the enemy, liberate Pskov, and restore the honor of Russia. John shouted in the excitement of anger: “Rebel! You and the boyars want to overthrow me from the throne,”and raised his hand. Boris Godunov wanted to keep her. The king gave him several wounds with his sharp rod and hit the prince in the head with them. This unfortunate man fell bleeding! It is significant that this version, accepted by Karamzin as reliable, belonged to the same Antonio Possevino. The credibility of this completely literary presentation is even more doubtful than the first version, it has not been confirmed by any other evidence. A grain of truth, however,present in this version. It is that the situation in the last years of the reign of Ivan the Terrible at court was, to put it mildly, tense. Surviving in such an environment was extremely difficult.
Promotional video:
Who wrote history
It is amazing how surprisingly trustful Russian historians, and first of all Karamzin, “wrote history”, focusing on the testimony of Antonio Possevino, the legate of Pope Gregory XIII, the German Heinrich Staden and the Frenchman Jacques Marjarette. In all historical interpretations, especially foreign ones, one should look for who benefits from it. The same Staden, returning to Germany, outlined a project for the conquest of Muscovy, proposing to destroy churches and monasteries, abolish the Orthodox faith, and then turn the inhabitants into slaves. With regret, it is worth recognizing the correctness of the historian Zabelin, who wrote: “As you know, we are very zealous only to deny and denounce our history and dare not even think about any characters and ideals. We do not admit the ideal in our history … Our entire history is a dark kingdom of ignorance, barbarism, hypocrisy, slavery, and so on …”.
Poisoning?
In 1963, the tombs of Tsar John Vasilyevich and Tsarevich John Ioannovich were opened in the Archangel Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin. The subsequent reliable research, medico-chemical and medico-forensic examinations of the honest remains of the prince showed that the permissible content of mercury was 32 times exceeded, and several times the amount of arsenic and lead. Due to the poor preservation of bone tissue, it was impossible to reliably establish whether Ivan Ivanovich's skull was fractured. Taking into account the fact that Ivan the Terrible's mother and his first wife also died from poisoning with selma, the version with the poisoning of Ivan the Terrible's son seems the most likely. Another question: who was the poisoner?
Did not kill
Ivan the Terrible did not kill his son. This is the version that Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, adhered to, for example. Seeing the famous painting by Repin at the exhibition, he was outraged and wrote to Emperor Alexander III: "You cannot call the picture historical, since this moment … is purely fantastic." An analysis of what happened in 1582 confirms Pobedonostsev's idea, it is that it is “fantastic”. Since the time of Repin's painting, the version of "Ivan the Terrible killed his son" has become a kind of historical meme. She is so rooted in the mind that the thought of Grozny's innocence in the death of his son is often simply not considered. By the way, the picture has a difficult fate. In February 1913 she was badly damaged by the knife of the Old Believer Abram Baloshov,and more recently, Orthodox activists asked the Minister of Culture to remove the painting from the Tretyakov Gallery.
Son's rest
The death of his son seriously affected Ivan IV. The untimely death of his son made him a "mortgaged dead", he could not be buried, he was doomed to eternal suffering. In 1583 Ivan the Terrible came out with an unprecedented initiative - to introduce the so-called "Synodic of the Disgraced" - "eternal" commemoration of the victims of the Oprichnina into the liturgical use of the monastic cloisters of the Moscow Metropolitanate. In fact, the king offered God a deal: for the sake of saving the soul of the deceased son, to create relief from the posthumous torment of the executed disgraced.
