Time of Troubles
From Freepedia
- For the Dungeons & Dragons plotline, see Time of Troubles (Forgotten Realms).
The Time of Troubles (Russian: Смутное время, Smutnoye Vremya) was a period of Russian history comprising the end of 16th and beginning of 17th century.
The Time of Troubles started in 1598, when the last of Moscow Rurikids, Tsar Feodor Ivanovich, died without issue. On his death Feodor's brother-in-law and closest advisor, Boris Godunov, was elected his successor by a Great National Assembly. His short reign (1598-1605) was not so successful as his administration under the weak Feodor. The oligarchical party, headed by the Romanovs, considered it a disgrace to obey a simple boyar; conspiracies were frequent, the rural districts were desolated by famine and plague, great bands of armed brigands roamed about the country committing all manner of atrocities, the Cossacks on the frontier were restless, and the government showed itself incapable of maintaining order.
Under the influence of the great nobles who had unsuccessfully opposed the election of Godunov, the general discontent took the form of hostility to him as a usurper, and rumours were heard that the late tsar's younger brother Dmitri, supposed to be dead, was still alive and in hiding. In 1603 a man calling himself Dmitri, and professing to be the rightful heir to the throne, appeared in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In reality the younger son of Ivan the Terrible had been strangled before his brother's death by orders (it was said but never proved) of Godunov and the mysterious individual who was impersonating him was an impostor; but he was regarded as the rightful heir by a large section of the population, and gathered support both in Muscovy and outside its borders, in Commonwealth and Vatican. A few months later he crossed the frontier with a small force of 4,000 Poles, Russian exiles, German mercenaries and Cossacks from the Dnieper and the Don, in what marked the beginning of the Commonwealth intervention in Muscovy, or the Dymitriad wars. However, the Commonwealth has not officialy declared war on Muscovy, its king, Sigismund III Vasa, was opposed to the intervention; however some powerful magnates decided to support the False Dmitri with their own forces and money, expecting rich rewards afterwards. Dmitri was married per procura to Marina Mniszech and immediately after timely Boris's death in 1605 he made his triumphal entry into Moscow.
The reign of Dmitri was short and uneventful. Before a year had passed a conspiracy was formed against him by an ambitious Rurikid knyaz called Vasily Shuisky, and he was assassinated in the Moscow Kremlin, together with many of his supporters. The chief conspirator, Shuisky, seized the power and was elected tsar by an Assembly composed of his faction, but neither the ambitious Muscovy boyars or Commonwealth magnates, nor the pillaging Cossacks, nor the German mercenaries were satisfied with the change, and soon a new impostor, likewise calling himself Dmitri, son of Tsar Ivan, came forward as the rightful heir. Like his predecessor, False Dmitri I, he enjoyed the protection and support of the Polish magnates. However after Shuisky signed an alliance with Sweden, Commonwealth king, Sigismund III, decied finally to officialy intervene in Muscovy internal affairs. Commonwealth troops crossed the Muscovy borders and lay siege to the fortress of Smolensk. After the defeat of Muscovy forces at the battle of Kluszyn Shuisky was forced to abdicate; however, False Dmitrii II wasn't able to gain the throne, because as soon as the throne was vacant Polish commander, hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski, put forward as a candidate Sigismund's son, Wladislaus. To this latter some people in Moscow swore allegiance on condition of his maintaining Orthodoxy and granting certain rights, and on this understanding the Polish troops were allowed to occupy the city and the Kremlin. Then Sigismund opposed the compromise, deciding to take the throne for himself and to convert Russia into Roman Catholicism. This scheme did not please any of the contending factions and it roused the anti-Catholic and anti-Polish sentiments of the masses. At the same time it was displeasing to the Swedes, who had become rivals of the Poles on the Baltic coast, and they started a false Dmitri of their own in Novgorod.
Russia was thus in a very critical condition. The throne was vacant, as Sigismund and Wladislaw left Moscow when the tensions grew, the great nobles (boyars) quarrelling among themselves, Patriarch Hermogenes in chains, the Catholic Poles in the Kremlin of Moscow and breaching Smolensk walls, the Protestant Swedes in Novgorod, and enormous bands of brigands everywhere. The severity of the crisis produced a remedy, in the form of a patriotic rising of the nation under the leadership of a Nizhny Novgorod butcher (literally by profession) Kuzma Minin and a Rurikid Prince Pozharsky. By 1612 the invaders were expelled from Moscow, and a Grand National Assembly elected as tsar Michael Romanov, the young son of the metropolitan Philaret, who was connected by marriage with the late dynasty. In the end, it was the Romanov boyars faction which was able to gain the upper hand in this civil war, and establish one of the most prominent tsar dynsaties in the Muscovy (soon to be known as Russia) history.
The Dymitriad wars against the Commonwealth would last until the Peace of Deulino in 1619, and the Ingrian Wars against the Sweden lasted until the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617. Both forced Muscovy to make some territorial concessions, though the majority of them would be regained over the coming centuries.
See also
- Polish-Muscovite War (1605-1618)
- False Dmitriy I
- Ingrian War
- Muscovy
- The De la Gardie Campaign
- Treaty of Stolbovo
- Ivan Susanin
References
This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.
| Preceded by: Vasili IV | Interregnum 1610–1613 | Succeeded by: Michael I |
