History is a purely materialistic science. But, when describing certain historical events, sometimes one has to deal with amazing coincidences that can only be explained by the interference in purely earthly affairs of some supernatural forces.
Take, for example, the so-called family curses of kings. It is impossible to explain the cases when fate severely punished members of royal dynasties who were publicly damned for the crimes committed by their ancestors other than by the intervention of higher forces.
Marinkino grief …
Let's face it, fate has cruelly treated the daughter of the Sandomierz governor Marina Mnishek.
In 1605, she, young and beautiful, became engaged to Tsarevich Dmitry Ioannovich, the son of the Russian Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible. And she didn't give a damn that various bad things were said about him. Say, he is not a prince, but a fugitive defrocked monk Grigory Otrepiev. The main thing is that wealthy Muscovy recognized him as heir to the throne of Rurikovich. Which lady will refuse the royal crown?
In 1606, Marina Mnishek arrived in Moscow, where she got married to the Tsar of All Russia Dmitry. True, she did not have to be a queen for long. Two weeks after the wedding, her husband was killed by the servants of the boyar Shuisky, and Marina herself was exiled to Yaroslavl.
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There she was found by a “miraculously saved husband,” who this time was already an outspoken impostor. Marina "recognized" him, because only by becoming the wife of this man, she could again regain royal honor and power. From "Tsar Dmitry Ioannovich", later known as False Dmitry II, Marina gave birth in 1610 to a son named Ivan.
But she did not last long as a queen. After the murder of her husband in December 1610, Marina fled with her son to Astrakhan. Cossack chieftain Ivan Zarutsky became her lover and patron. But by that time the Troubles came to an end, and the new Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov was cleaning the Russian land from the detachments of impostors of various calibers and just robbers. Marina Mnishek also fell under the distribution.
With her son and lover, she was caught by the tsarist archers in 1614 in the Urals and taken to Moscow for trial. Under the new tsar, they tried harshly: ataman Ivan Zarutsky was impaled, her four-year-old son was hanged, and Marina herself was imprisoned forever in the tower of the Kolomna Kremlin.
They say that after the brutal massacre of her son, Marina cursed the entire Romanov family, promising that many of them would be killed, and those who would die a natural death would be tormented before death for more than one day.
For three hundred years the Romanov dynasty will rule Russia, after which the enemies will put the Romanovs in prison, and then kill them. Marina also prophesied that the Romanov dynasty, which began with Michael, would end with Mikhail.
Marina Mnishek herself soon died in captivity. And her curse began to come true. Indeed, of the Romanovs, the kings were killed: John VI Antonovich, Peter III, Paul I, Alexander II and Nicholas II. The rest of the reigning Romanovs died in agony from serious illnesses.
In the damp, cold basement of the Ipatiev House in 1918, the family of the last Emperor Nicholas II was shot. And formally, the dynasty ended with the brother of Nicholas II, the Grand Duke Mikhail, in whose favor the last Russian monarch abdicated the throne.
For kings to remember and fear …
One of the heavenly patrons of Poland is St. Stanislav. In the middle of the 11th century he was the bishop of Krakow and was in a very tense relationship with the king Boleslav II the Brave, who ruled in Poland at that time. The king was distinguished by a violent disposition and unbridled behavior.
It so happened that a noble lady was raped by a king in 1079. The bishop condemned Boleslav for this heinous crime. The king, angry with the priest, threatened him with earthly punishments. In response, the bishop excommunicated the monarch from the church.
Distraught with rage, Boleslav burst into the Krakow Church of St. Michael, in which the bishop was celebrating mass, and with his own hand killed the servant of God right at the altar. He killed the bishop brutally - in 1963, an examination of the remains of St. Stanislaus was carried out, buried in the treasury of the Cathedral in Wawel.
Scientists have established that the bishop died at the age of about 40. On his skull were traces of 7 sword blows. The blows were delivered from behind.
Pope Gregory VII, as punishment for this murder, imposed an interdict on Poland (a ban on all church services). Troubles began in the country, and King Boleslav was forced to flee the country. He found refuge in Hungary, where he tried to convince King Vladislav to help him regain the throne. According to one version, the Hungarians killed the fugitive Polish king.
Back in the Middle Ages, a tradition appeared in Poland: each new king, before the coronation, necessarily walked the path from Krakow's Wawel Castle to the Cathedral of St. Michael, in which Stanislav was killed. and there, at the altar, on his knees, he asked for forgiveness for “the sin of his ancestor Boleslav”. This custom was strictly observed in Poland. Only two kings violated it, having crowned not in Krakow, but in Warsaw.
Another Polish custom is not to appoint priests named Stanislav as bishops in Krakow, and also not to give this name to newborn boys in the Polish royal dynasties, and when the era of "elected" kings began, candidates for the throne with this name were categorically rejected.
These customs were violated only in the 18th century. On the Polish throne were two kings who did not perform the ancient rite and bore the name Stanislav. We are talking about Stanislav Leshchinsky (1677-1766) and Stanislav Ponyatovsky (1732-1798). And only they repeated the fate of King Boleslav. They were dethroned and buried in a foreign land.
Leshchinsky was king twice: first from 1704 to 1709, and then in 1735, becoming king a second time, he did not sit on the throne for a year and died in France in complete poverty and obscurity.
And Poniatowski became king of Poland solely because at one time he managed to get into bed with the wife of the heir to the Russian throne, Peter Fedorovich, the future Empress Catherine the Great.
Stanislav Ponyatovsky is the only king in the world who was whipped by his own subjects. The inglorious reign of Poniatovsky is over. the fact that Poland went through three successive partitions, after which it finally disappeared from the map of Europe.
The ex-king himself was warmed out of mercy by his former mistress in Russia. Here he died and was buried in St. Petersburg in the Church of St. Catherine. In 1938, his ashes were transferred to Poland. In the end, the last Polish king rested in the Church of St. John in Warsaw.
Friday the thirteenth
Historians believe that the most famous royal curse is the curse that was imposed in 1314 by the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay.
King Philip IV the Handsome arrested the Templars on Friday October 13, 1307. And then he organized a trial against the Templar Knights, which ended in the defeat of the order and the execution of its highest ranks.
According to legend, at the stake the Grand Master cursed the pope and the king: "Clement, unjust judge, I summon you to the Judgment of God for 40 days from today, and you, King Philip, are also unjust, up to a year."
Pope died of dysentery a month later, and less than a year later Philip IV died under mysterious circumstances - most likely, he was poisoned by the surviving Templars. The curse also affected the descendants of the monarch up to the 13th generation.
King Philip had three sons, future kings: Louis X, Philip V and Charles IV, but none of them had a male descendant. The grandson of the accursed king, John I the Posthumous, so nicknamed because he was born five months after the death of his father Louis X, reigned for only five days, having died for an unknown reason. King Philip VI of Valois was the nephew of Philip the Fair.
Under him, an epidemic of plague began in France, which mowed down half of the country and killed Queen Jeanne. King Charles VIII on the eve of Palm Sunday 1498, in order to shorten the path, decided to go through the gallery, which served as a toilet. Striking with a bang on the lintel, he bruised his head and died here, in the stinking corridor, on a dirty straw mat.
In 1559, at a tournament in Paris, King Henry II, in a duel with the captain of the Royal Guard, Montgomery, was wounded in the eye with a spear. The wound was fatal.
The sons of Henry II and Catherine de Medici-Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III - plunged the country into the abyss of religious wars. The assassination by Henry III of the Duke of Guise, who claimed the throne, and the funeral of the latter resulted in a grandiose demonstration in Paris, during which its participants extinguished their candles and shouted: "So may the Lord extinguish the Valois dynasty!"
On August 1, 1589, the thirteenth in the Capetian and Valois family, Henry III was stabbed to death by the monk Jacques Clement. And the rebellious spirit of the great Templar finally calmed down. And the Bourbons came to the throne.
Fedor SMIRNOV