It is known that Nicholas II had less than one percent of Russian blood. A little more than one and a half percent - from his father, Alexander III. We decided to see how Russian the Russian princes and tsars were.
Vladimir Svyatoslavovich
In disputes over the nationality of almost every ruler of Russia, the spears of historians break. The most heated debate today is the nationality of Vladimir the Great.
Disputes are about the nationality of his mother, Malusha, the housekeeper of Queen Olga and the concubine of Prince Svyatoslav.
The Russian historian of the 19th century Dmitry Prozorovsky believed that Malusha was the daughter of Prince Mal Drevlyansky, who raised an uprising against Igor in 945 …
At the end of the 19th century, the historian Dmitry Ilovaisky, in his book "Investigations about the Beginning of Russia", expressed the opinion that Malusha is a Slavic Scandinavian name Malfred.
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Aleksey Shakhmatov wrote that he believed that Malusha's father was Mstisha-Lut Sveneldich, whose name was modified into "Malk". Sveneld was possibly the prince of the street and the Drevlyans.
Shakhmatov's hypothesis was refuted by Rybakov, Soloviev and Poppé as leading lexical developments from a false basis.
The historian Tatishchev believed that Mal Lyubchanin was a merchant from the Baltic Lubeck. Tatyana Berstam supported this assumption. She drew attention to the record of Vasily Tatishchev about the existence of the ancient Novgorod coat of arms with the image of the head of an ox - "like the Mecklenburg one." According to Tatishchev, this symbol belonged to the Slavs who moved to Novgorod from the vicinity of Lubeck.
Another version: Malusha was the daughter of the Khazar king Mal. According to the author of this hypothesis, Nikolai Kozlov, this is confirmed by the fact that Vladimir accepted the title of kagan and chose the Abramic religion for Russia, since he was a Jew by his mother. As you can see, Kozlov's arguments are demagogic, from the category “the snow is cold because the Himalayas”.
Yury Dolgoruky
For a long time, the version of Vasily Tatishchev that Yuri Dolgoruky was half English was considered official. Gita of Wessex, an English princess, was considered the mother of the founder of Moscow. However, the prince could also be the son of the second wife of Vladimir Monomakh, Efimia, since Geeta of Wessex, daughter of the Anglo-Saxon king Harold II, died on March 10, probably 1098, while "Gyurgeva mati", which is mentioned in the "Teachings" of Vladimir Monomakh, died on May 7 1107 year.
Most likely, they were two different women.
Yuri Dolgoruky was the son of Vladimir Monomakh, whose mother was supposedly Greek, Yuri Dolgoruky's great-grandmother was Swedish.
Andrey Bogolyubsky
The son of Yuri Dolgoruky, the “first great Russian,” Andrei Bogolyubsky was the son of a Polovtsian princess. Polovtsi at Bogolyubsky made up a significant part of his army. According to one of the versions of the death of the prince, one of the reasons for the reprisal against him was the desire of the Kuchkovichs to change the "national policy": under Andrei Bogolyubsky, relations with Byzantium worsened, and an influx of immigrants from different lands, even from the Caucasus, began to northeast Russia.
It was practiced under Bogolyubsky and the "conversion" of Gentile merchants, as a result of which the number of Jews who converted to Christianity increased. Supporters of this version of the conspiracy recall that one of the conspirators was the Jew Ephraim Moizich.
Ivan IV
Genetically, the Russian power was steadily Europeanized: the Lithuanians who entered the service of Ivan III (his maternal great-grandfather was the Lithuanian prince Olgerd Gediminovich, and the Lithuanian prince Vitovt Keistutovich on his father's side) and his father, a hundred years later already dreamed of a Monomakh hat, and after two hundred - actually got it.
The mother of Ivan the Terrible, Elena Glinskaya, was from a Lithuanian family. After the death of her husband in December 1533, she became the ruler of the Grand Duchy of Moscow (for this she removed the regents appointed by her husband). Thus, she became the first after the Grand Duchess Olga (except for Sophia Vitovtovna, whose power in many Russian lands outside the Moscow principality was formal) ruler of the Russian state.
The grandmother of Ivan the Terrible was Sophia Palaeologus, who came from the Byzantine imperial dynasty of the Palaeologus.
1/128
After the death of Elizabeth Petrovna (1761), the direct female line of the Romanov dynasty was interrupted; the male line was cut short with the death of Peter II in 1730.
On November 7, 1742, Elizabeth appointed her nephew (the son of Anna Petrovna's elder sister) Duke Karl-Peter Ulrich Holstein as the official heir to the throne.
In Russia, he was renamed in the Russian manner in Peter Fedorovich, and the words "grandson of Peter the Great" were included in the official title.
The wife of Peter Fedorovich was the German woman Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst, who remained in history as Catherine the Great.
Thus, in 1762, the Holstein-Gottorp line (direct male lineage descendants of the Danish king Frederick I) ascended the Russian throne.
Russian tsars also married German women. Of all the spouses of the emperors, only the wife of Alexander III was a Danish princess, from the Danish line of the same Oldenburg house as the Holstein-Gottorp.
Historian Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov, exploring the German roots of the Romanov dynasty, mentally performed an experiment for greater clarity - he mixed red wine (as an analogue of Russian blood) with water (analogue of German blood).
The Russian aristocrats also remembered about their "German origin". Emigrant prince Pyotr Vladimirovich Dolgorukov wrote about Alexander II as “performing the post of Romanov in Russia” and even wrote to him directly: “You know, sir, that my ancestors were great princes and ruled Russia at a time when your Majesty's ancestors were not yet Counts of Oldenburg ". It is known that in an informal setting, many nobles called the imperial family "Holstein-Gottorp".
The authorities did not ignore such attacks. Alexander III wrote in 1886 to Konstantin Pobedonostsev: “There are gentlemen who think that they are only Russians, and no one else. Do they no longer imagine that I am German or Chukhonets? It is easy for them with their buffoonery patriotism when they are not responsible for anything."
The last Russian emperor had 1/128 of Russian blood.