Dangerous heir
After the death of Ivan the Terrible, only two of his direct heirs remained - the feeble-minded Fyodor and the underage Dmitry. However, the latter could claim the throne only as a last resort, since he was the son of the tsar from the sixth marriage, which, according to Orthodox canons, was considered invalid. However, the childlessness of Fyodor Ioannovich, who took the throne, allowed such a scenario. Modern anthropologists who examined the remains of Irina Godunova, the wife of Tsar Fyodor, came to the conclusion that, due to a defect in the pelvic bones, she could not reproduce healthy offspring.
The actual ruler of the state, Boris Godunov, decided to remove the baby Dmitry from sight together with his mother Maria Naga. The exiles settled in Uglich - their specific possession. However, the real power there was possessed by the Moscow "service people", headed by Mikhail Bityagovsky, who received an order from Moscow to keep an eye on the Nagi.
The Moscow courtyard was hostile to the Uglich courtyard. It is known that Boris Godunov ordered not to mention the name of Dmitry Ioannovich in litanies, they tried to keep silent about him in other cases. In Uglich, they also did not hide their negative position. Maria Nagaya was unhappy with the removal from the political life of the country, and Dmitry, according to the testimony of the writer Avraamy Palitsyn, spoke rudely about the entourage of his brother Fyodor Ioannovich, including Boris Godunov.
English diplomat Giles Fletcher wrote that "the life of the prince is in danger from attempts on the part of those who extend their views on the possession of the throne in the event of the king's childless death." The Englishman also drew attention to the fact that the negative qualities of his father began to appear in Dmitry. According to him, the prince found "pleasure in watching sheep being killed, seeing a cut throat when blood flows from it."
Historian Lyudmila Morozova notes on this that there is little reliable information about Dmitry's life in exile, since the Naked led a secluded life. She considers the stories of foreigners about the cruelty of the prince to be fiction.
On May 15, 1591, an event took place, the debate about which does not subside to this day. On this day, the lifeless body of Tsarevich Dmitry with a slit throat was discovered. Suspicion of the murder immediately fell on Mikhail Bityagovsky and his relatives. Maria Nagaya pointed at them, and the angry crowd tore them to pieces.
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Consequence
After the riots in Uglich, the government sent a commission headed by the eminent boyar Vasily Shuisky to investigate the circumstances of the tragedy. The Soviet historian Ivan Polosin, commenting on Shuisky's new position, emphasized that the very fact of the appointment of Prince Shuisky's "most unprincipled, most notorious, Godunov's most notorious enemy" to the commission of inquiry "should have testified that Godunov was not involved in the Uglich events." In the course of the investigation, about 150 witnesses were interrogated - Nagy, representatives of the clergy, courtyards and townspeople - everyone who could somehow shed light on this mysterious event. All materials were included in the investigation file, a white copy of which, according to historians, was compiled back in Uglich. On the basis of the document that has come down to us, modern researchers are trying to recreate a picture of what happened.
The commission on the Uglich case came to the conclusion that the cause of Dmitry's death was the "epilepsy" suffered by the youngest son of Grozny. An attack of illness caught the prince while playing with knives, as a result of which he ran his throat onto a sharp object (knife or nail). The wound was fatal.
An important argument was the testimony of the mother of Tsarevich Vasilisa Volkhova, who told the investigators that something similar had happened before. For the first time, “he was suffering from an epileptic illness, and he beat the pile and his mother, his queen Marya,” another time, “the prince ate the hands of Ondreeva's daughter Nagovo, as soon as Ondreeva's daughter Nagovo was taken away from him.”
The results of the investigation were reported to the tsar. Now it was necessary to debunk the version of the Nagikh, who claimed that the prince was stabbed to death on direct orders from Moscow. On June 2, 1591, a meeting of the Consecrated Council, headed by Patriarch Job, took place, during which Maria Nagaya recognized the massacre of the Bityagovskys as "a wrong thing" and asked for leniency for her relatives. The council convicted the Nagy of arbitrariness. Mary was tonsured into a nun under the name of Martha, her brothers were sent into exile, and the most violent participants in the riots were executed.
Revision
Years passed, on the Russian throne was False Dmitry I, posing as a miracle of the escaped son of Ivan the Terrible. To everyone's surprise, Maria Nagaya recognized him. Now Shuisky was interested in revising the "Uglich affair". He returned to the version of the murder, in order not only to prove the fact of the death of the prince, but also to declare him a holy martyr. All this was supposed to dispel rumors about the miraculous salvation of Dmitry and help Shuisky himself to take the Moscow throne.
On June 3, 1606, two weeks after the overthrow of the impostor, the "incorruptible" relics of Tsarevich Dmitry were transported from Uglich to Moscow and placed in the Archangel Cathedral. Thousands of curious people came here, and very soon rumors of miraculous healings spread. The Dutch merchant and traveler Isaac Massa, who visited the relics, said that only a select few were allowed to view the relics. As a result, he assumed that the body of the real prince had decayed a long time ago, and a recently deceased boy was put in his place.
Historian Nikolai Kostomarov points out that Shuisky, in his own interests, changed his testimony in the Tsarevich's case at least three times. So, having already been elected to the Russian throne, he declared that the tsarevich was “slain by” from “the evil slave Boris Godunov”. This point of view became official under the Romanovs, and after the canonization of the "innocent murdered", any doubts on this score began to be regarded by the Church as heresy.
Versions
Modern researchers continue to consider three versions of the Uglich events: an accident, a murder at the instigation of Godunov, and a miraculous rescue. However, the latter hypothesis is increasingly being criticized. Most historians believe that Boris Godunov quite reasonably proved that False Dmitry was a fugitive monk Grishka Otrepiev, and there are no other reasons to claim that the Tsarevich survived.
The testimonies of the supporters of the accident, according to Kostomarov, are completely uniform: it seems that “they all trudged along the same yardstick; the tuning fork is given - everyone sang in unison."
Killing is harder. Kostomarov, for example, notes that initially the investigators deliberately took the testimony of those who testified about the death of the tsarevich at their own hands. “The question of whether Demetrius was stabbed is not allowed; clearly and deliberately bypass it, try to close it with a prudent silence."
Historians began to dispute the hypothesis of murder already at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1829, Mikhail Pogodin wrote in bewilderment: “Why would murderers act with a resounding knife instead of a quiet poison? How many improbabilities! How many incongruities!"
Many modern historians, in particular Sergei Platonov and Ruslan Skrynnikov, see no reason to doubt the conclusions of the 16th century commission of inquiry that the death of the tsarevich was an accident.
Leading researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences Lyudmila Morozova, based on the numerous testimonies of witnesses recorded in the Uglich investigation file, also came to the conclusion that "Dmitry stabbed himself, and was not killed on the orders of Boris Godunov." A number of interviewees reported that Mikhail Bityagovsky and his son Daniel were at home and had dinner at the time of Tsarevich Dmitry's death. As it is written in the file, Maria Nagaya herself, convincing that the prince was killed, could not see his death, since she was in her chambers. Moreover, the boys who played knives with the tsarevich unequivocally assert that Dmitry fell to the ground and "beat himself up."
However, Rem Kharitonov, a prominent Soviet specialist on childhood epilepsy, stated that during a seizure, the patient always releases objects in his hands. He was sure that the prince could not inflict a wound on himself.
Paying attention to this, forensic scientist Ivan Krylov put forward a version that the cause of Dmitry's death was a careless throw of a knife by one of the participants in the game.
Magazine: History from the "Russian Seven", Almanac No. 3