Vasily's Mob kills False Dmitry I

Vasily's Mob kills False Dmitry I
05/17/1606 AD killed by

Ten days after Tsarina Marina's coronation, a massive number of boyars and commoners storm the Kremlin in the morning. Tsar Dmitry tries to flee, jumping out a window, but fractures his leg in the fall.

He is recognized as he tries to disappear into a bathhouse and is dragged out before the populace by the boyars, who kill the tsar lest he successfully muster an appeal to the crowd.

His body is put on display and then cremated, with the ashes allegedly shot from a cannon towards Poland.

Rumors had circulated that Dmitry had obtained the support of the Polish king Sigismund and Pope Paul V by promising to reunite the Russian Orthodox Church and the Holy See; it was for these alleged reasons, claimed the rumors, that Tsarina Marina did not convert to the Orthodox faith. This angered the Russian Orthodox Church, the boyars, and the population alike.

The resentful Prince Vasily Shuisky, head of the boyars, began to plot against the tsar, accusing Dmitry of spreading Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and sodomy. This gained popular support, especially as Dmitry surrounded himself with foreigners who flouted Russian customs. According to Russian chronicler Avraamy Palitsyn, Dmitry further enraged many Muscovites by permitting his Catholic and Protestant soldiers, whom the Russian Church regarded as heretics, to pray in Orthodox churches.

Shuisky's adherents had spread word that Tsar Dmitry was about to order his Polish retainers to lock the city gates and massacre the people of Moscow. Whether such orders existed or not, Palitsyn's chronicle reported them as undeniable fact.

According to Palitsyn, Dmitry's death was followed by the massacre of his supporters. Palitsyn boasted in his chronicle that "a great amount of heretical blood was spilled on the streets of Moscow."

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