Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to blameache our reporting and I'm fair a dowdy, and the subject of royal pretenders is one that just really continues to fascinate and intrigue the both of us. In March, we covered Lambert Simnel, who was pretender to the English throne at the young age of ten. But here's the thing. While he and his supporters may have given Henry the seventh cause for concern, Simnel never actually became king. But for the royal pretender we're gonna look at here, it was a really different story. Czar Dmitri, who's commonly known as False Dmitri the First. Not only you searched the Russian throne in sixteen o five, he also gained the widespread support of people across all classes in Russia while pretending to be the son of none other than Ivan the Terrible. So he did it. He's not just a pretender. He really made it happen. But we're gonna be calling him false to me Tree the first. But just so we can avoid any confusion right off the bat, there were actually two other false Dmitris who weren't quite as successful as this first one, and we're going to talk about both of them too, But first, before things get too complicated, we need to set up this story a little bit and talk about who the real Dmitri was, leaving those other three false guys out of the picture for the moment, and also try to figure out why somebody would try to pretend to be him in the first place before we take a look at those questions. So we've really got to take a look at sixteenth century Russia, or the end of the sixteenth century, at least as the sixteenth century was drawing to a close, the old dynasty of the Grand Princes of Moscow, or the Ruric dynasty was coming to an end. Sorr Ivan, better known as Ivan the Terrible, died in four and though he'd had a number of wives, countless lovers, and many many children, he really didn't have that many options for an air partly his own fault to right, so this is what happened. Many of the legitimate children that he had turned out to be sickly and they didn't survive Ivan. As for the illegitimate ones, it said that Ivan would actually suffocate them with his own hands to make sure there wasn't a power struggle after he died. Ironically, a power struggle does still develop. That's very true. There were two sons left after Ivan died, Fyodor and Dmitri. Fyodor was the older one, and he actually became czar after Ivan's death. He wasn't a very effective czar, though some sources suggest that he may have actually had some sort of mental disability or the very least was ill suited to ruling the country. So somebody else had to step in. His wife's brother, Boris Godonoff, who basically governed for him, and before his death, Ivan even named golden Off as Fyodor's guardian. So it's the start of trouble raising this this man to a very high, very powerful position, because Godanov had a lot of power now and it seemed like maybe he would be the next in line for the he own. And there was still that other son though, so this is where things get complicated. Dmitri Ivan's other legitimate child, but at this point he was just a little boy, so he didn't seem to be a real contender here as a successor to Feodor. Yeah, also, it might have been tough to prove Dmitri's legitimacy because he was the son of Ivan's seventh or maybe eighth wife, depending on what source you look at, and I think something like after the third wife, the kids weren't really considered legitimate, so that caused a problem anyway, but he still would have had a claim, So that's probably why Dmitri and his mother were exiled to oogly each after Ivan's death. But the boy died there in fifteen nine, around age eight or ten, and of course there are mysterious circumstances involved. It wouldn't be a good pretender story unless there were some mysterious circumstances, just a Russian royal childhood story. So some people said that the death was natural, although natural doesn't even really sound very good. He supposedly stabbed himself during an epileptic siege. Yeah, you have to wonder why an eight to ten year old boys holding a knife anyway, Yeah, that was my first question, and how he managed to stab himself with it, But there you go. That's the one potentially natural solution. However, though there was also a rumor that it was Godenov who had had the child, murdered, which seems kind of likely to this this power hungry guy who does step in after this kid is out of the way. But regardless of what the truth was here, Dmitri was now out of the picture. And since Fyodor had a wife and only one daughter, Fiodoja, who died as an infant, this really left the door wide open for Godonov to step up and take the throne himself. And incidentally, some suspected godenovil involvement in Fyodojia's death too, so we should mention that. But sure enough, after Fyodora's death in fift Godenov was elected to the throne by popular assembly. But czar Boris, as he's often known, didn't have an easy go of it at all. We shouldn't make it seem entirely like he just came in there and claimed the throne for himself too. He was elected to his position, but not everyone was a fan of the news are Boris, in particular the Bowyers, who are basically old aristocratic family's upper nobility. They were specifically opposed to him, and out of all of these old families, the Romanovs especially really didn't like czar Boris. And part of that is because they thought they had a better claim to the throne is our Feodor's mother Ivan the terribles first wife, Anastasia, had been a Romanov, so the family thought that through through her and through their relation to the latest are, they had a pretty good claim. So zar Boris needed a way to deal with these rivals of his and what he did is in sixteen hundred he sent them all. He arrested them, He arrested all the Romanov brothers and sent them all out of Moscow. That wasn't the end of zar boris troubles though, either, as soon other social classes weren't really happy with him. Though some sources referred as zar Boris as an intelligent and capable ruler who did things like reforming the judicial system and sending students to be educated in Western Europe, he also had the misfortune of being on the throne during a terrible famine that lasted from about sixteen o one to sixteen oh three. The harvest failed all those summers, three successive summers, and czar Boris really didn't deal with us effectively at all. It hurt his reputation and destabilized his regime. Yeah, so there was this idea floating around that Czar Boris wasn't a true czar at all. These economic problems, these social conflicts that were all coming to ahead, even the famine, it was all kind of his fault. And this, combined with Dmitri's premature death, opened the door for pretenders, so new guys could come in and and the stage was set for for some kind of revolution it was. And then in sixteen o three, at the height of this crisis in Russia, a young man appeared in Poland Lithuania and presented himself to Prince Adam and other nobles there as the Tsarevich Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan a Terrible and the true heir to the Russian throne. Wait a minute, yeah, what's going on here? Supposed to be dead, He's supposed to be dead. So here's how Dmitri explained himself. He told people that Gonov had sent hired assassins to kill him and Ogleach back in fift So what was rumored to have happened did happen. Gonov had tried to have him killed, but his tutor had saved him, or so Dmitri claimed. By cleverly substituting another boy for Dmitri, and that boy was killed instead of him. So sounds like a pretty interesting story. And according to an article in History Today by Marine Perry, this new Dmitri, who did receive an audience with the Polish king in sixteen o four, had some pet some proof for all of these tall claims. For one, he was recognized supposedly by Russian exiles who claimed to have known the boy. You know, that's not it's not too hard to believe. There are some people would have definitely been familiar with his face, might have been able to recognize him. They also displayed so called royal birthmarks, and we're not quite what that means. We're trying to figure out what that meant. What what makes a royal birthmark? Or I don't know, is it especially large or like shaped like a crown, or is it just as simple as maybe they knew Dmitri had some specific birthmark and look, there it is. But or maybe the family all had the same birthmark something. Anyways, he has the royal birthmark, so he's good there. And then he also had a jeweled cross that was allegedly given to him by his Godfather. So the Polish are sold on this, and they have pretty good reason to to be sold. After Dimitri even converted to Catholicism in Krakow, so now he's sort of entering their fold and they're getting their new friend Dimitri or hoping to get their new friend to meet Tree on the Russian throne, which offered some really exciting possibilities for the expansion of Poland's influence into Um into Russia and the Vatican's reach as well. So, backed by these Lithuanian and Polish nobles and some Jesuits too, and with a newly gathered army of Cossacks and adventurers, this False Dmitri invaded Russia in October sixteen o four, and he had some initial victories. He did all right at first. He attracted followers, especially in southern Russia, and he won some towns in that region in which the townspeople overthrew their governors in favor of him, and most of his supporters were Cossacks, townspeople, peasants, and bondsmen in general. Though False Dmitri was defeated militarily until Czar Boris suddenly dies in April of sixteen o five, Then the government army shifted its support to Dmitri. Game changer it was they didn't want to swear allegiance to Zar Boris's son Theodore. So after the army has switched to lead and says, then there's a popular uprising against the Godenovs that leads the boyers to also think, hey, we want to switch over to so they murder Boris's son and his wife and false Dmitri arrived triumphantly in Moscow in June six oh five and is proclaimed Tsar with all the support of all sections of Russian society. So he made it. I mean, I know we already told you he would in the introduction, but I still feel like you sort of don't see that coming. He actually he's a pretender who makes it happen. So Zar Dmitri is on the throne. But we still have no idea who this guy really is. Our Boris had accused him of being one grigory A Trepev, who was a member of the gentry who was linked to the house of the Romanovs and later became a monk and what was pretty much the most prestigious monastery in Moscow at the time, but Boris had accused a trepiv of being a renegade type of monk who dabbled in things like sorcery and was league with Satan, never a good thing, for that's about the worst thing that you can do. And um, other accounts though, sort of painted a different picture. They had him standing in in good standing at the monastery, and um he rose in the ranks remarkably quickly there and and just sort of had a good reputation. So it's interesting is that many historians also think that false Dmitri was a treep of and this is probably the most prevalent theory that's out there right now. But some people think that there are some some critics of this theory, I should say, think that there are some timing issues with this. That's one criticism that they have that throw it into question. For example, the monk might have actually been too old to pass for Dmitri. We don't actually have any birth records of him, so although people say that they were around the same age, we don't actually know that that's true. So there are some flaws in this theory. And according to a piece by Chester Dunning and the Slavic Review, one thing that many scholars agree on is that whoever false Dmitri really was, he must have been raised from childhood to believe that he was really Dmitri because he played the role so convincingly. So I find that really interesting because you think about pretenders, and I don't know, I think I often assume that it's just like a decision they make and then the next year they're pretending to be this person. Political decision or a decision of ambition. Almost right, But this might have been more of a long term plan. It's the ambition of somebody else, presumably some older person who's who's grooming this young man or young boy even to to eventually take a place it. It reminded me again of the Lambert Simnal episode exactly. Although what's interesting in Dmitri's case is that there there have been a small number of researchers over the years who have pursued the possibility that Tsarevich Dmitri really did survive as a young child, and that maybe this was the real Dimitri. Demitri is the real Dmitri? Yeah, I mean there were some things that they point to, like irregularities with a child's burial. They waited for a long time to bury him, so maybe the bodies were swapped or something like that. So who knows a good one, But in general most people believed that he was in fact an impostor, but he didn't act like one when he got on the throne. Well in that would also explained being raised from a very young age to to truly believe that he was the the Tsarevich. But although some consider him to be the puppet of Polish nobles who supported him, several sources really paint false Dmitri as a quote extremely intelligent and resourceful leader, or a well educated for a Russian czar, or well versed in statecraft, advanced in his thinking and reform minded, and even possessing a quote lively even passionate temperament. So it sounded like a lot of people were pretty pleased with what they got, even if, even if the circumstances behind this young man coming to the throne were unusual, to say the least, it seemed like he did a pretty good job once he was there, or at least he doesn't seem like a total pepp decent job. Richard Helly even described of Dmitri as quote one of the few really enlightened rulers Russia has ever had, and Dunning notes that some scholars have seen Demitri as a forerunner to Peter the Great. Some of the things that Zar Dmitri accomplished, in case you're interested, He lowered the tax burden and labor demands of the time. He also made plans for promoting education and science and Russia, and he worked to promote the effectiveness of the Russian army. Unfortunately, though, or at least unfortunately for False Dmitri, he didn't have that much time to to accomplish all of these things. Having a mind of his own really turned out to be his detriment, and he anchored a lot of people, especially a lot of these these nobles who weren't too two into it in the first place, you know what I'm saying. So one of the things he did that really angered a lot of people was that early conversion to Catholicism. He also married the daughter of a Polish Catholic nobleman named Marina, which really even further strengthened that connection. But he also did some other things that would have maybe upset the boyars of the time. He disrupted a lot of cultural norms. For example, he dressed and acted in informal or western ways. He didn't attend church services for many hours each day. He did, he did attend church services and go to functions and things like that, but he didn't do it maybe as for as long or he wasn't as involved as people hoped that he would be. He also didn't rest after the midday meal, which was customary, and he also didn't hide his disdain for the low level of education among Boyars. So maybe that's why after just a year as our false Dmitri falls victim to a Boyar plot on May seventeen, sixteen oh six, and after Dmitri's murder, the Boyars put Vassili Showiski, a man from an old Boyar family on the throne, one of their own, one of their own exactly, And this marked the beginning of a period of political crisis known in Russia as the time of Troubles. So we've we've told you in the beginning there were going to be a few of these false Dmitri. So now with this false Dmitri, the first out of the way, opens the door for for some new impostors to come in. Almost Immediately after the nobles pulled off this plot murdering Dmitri the Czar, rumors started circulating that Dmitri had yet again escaped death. Maybe these rumors were started by his wife, maybe some other supporter, and it took a while for for anything to come of that, but eventually the second False Dmitri did show up in July seven. He bore no physical resemblance to the first False Dmitri. He actually gained a following, though that didn't really seem to matter. He gained enough of a following, including Cossacks and Poles and Lithuanians and rebels, to cause the news are some real trouble and um it's it's. It gets even weirder than that, though, when you consider how far the support of this sect a False Dmitri went. He did gain a lot of support. He gained control of Southern Russia and set up headquarters at the village of Tushino, and that's why he's sometimes known as the Thief of Tushino. But the really crazy part here, to me at least, is that Marina False Dmitri, the first wife, recognizes the second false Dmitri as her husband, which gives him credibility. I mean, people think, obviously, if this woman says this is her husband, it must be true. Right. So they stayed together. They had a son eventually, who they named Ivan, and False Dmitri the second was eventually killed by one of his own followers in sixteen ten. No one to this day really knows who he was. He may have been a prett son or maybe a baptized Jew called Bogdanco. So with false Dmitri the second out of the way, we have an opening for false Dmitri the third, And on March sixteen eleven, a third False Dmitri does show up in northwest Russia. This time, but he I mean, I guess it was an old story. By this point, he really didn't gain quite as much of a following, and historians identify him as a former deacon. He did gain the alliance of, or the allegiance at least of some Cothics and a couple of towns, but he was also murdered by his own supporters May sixteen twelve. So that's the end of that immediate line of of Dmitries. But there were others that that followed, not necessarily more Dimitris, but other pretenders to the throne. It was a pretty wild time. There were many pretenders apparently during the seventeenth century in Russia, and there are several explanations for that out there. For example, Perry suggests that monarchism was the only political ideology that existed in early modern Russia. So leaders of rebellions or social movements or what have you, they were called the true's are and their enemies were considered traitors. And that's kind of how they set up that dichotomy. Wouldn't work today. I don't think, no, not at all. I mean, I think the widespread use of photography would have put a pretty fast end to this sort of thing. But the DNA paternity testing. You're not dmitri. But I mean, I do think that that's interesting that the only avenue open for them was forging some kind of legitimacy, saying that you are somehow related to the royal family in order to get a new political ideology or a new regime out there, or overthrow somebody you don't like. It's a it's a strange way about of going about things, I think. Comparing it to today, though, I think that's why we're so interested in this phenomenon is because it's just something we can't fathom. It seems so outrageous, how because something like this happened. So we do love a good pretender story. And I know a lot of people have been suggesting Bonnie Prince Charlie lately, and he has seriously been on my list of podcast topics for I think since I started in History. To day did an article on him recently, so so he's still up there. But if you have any other pretender suggestions too, they are so much fun to talk about, you can email them to us a history podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We're also on Twitter at Midston History and we're on Facebook. You can leave us the comment in any of those ways. And if you want to learn a little bit more about how royalty and royal families work, we do have an article called how Royalty Works on our website. You can look it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone up has a rise Download it today on iTunes,

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to blameache our reporting and I'm fair a dowdy, and the subject of royal pretenders is one that just really continues to fascinate and intrigue the both of us. In March, we covered Lambert Simnel, who was pretender to the English throne at the young age of ten. But here's the thing. While he and his supporters may have given Henry the seventh cause for concern, Simnel never actually became king. But for the royal pretender we're gonna look at here, it was a really different story. Czar Dmitri, who's commonly known as False Dmitri the First. Not only you searched the Russian throne in sixteen o five, he also gained the widespread support of people across all classes in Russia while pretending to be the son of none other than Ivan the Terrible. So he did it. He's not just a pretender. He really made it happen. But we're gonna be calling him false to me Tree the first. But just so we can avoid any confusion right off the bat, there were actually two other false Dmitris who weren't quite as successful as this first one, and we're going to talk about both of them too, But first, before things get too complicated, we need to set up this story a little bit and talk about who the real Dmitri was, leaving those other three false guys out of the picture for the moment, and also try to figure out why somebody would try to pretend to be him in the first place before we take a look at those questions. So we've really got to take a look at sixteenth century Russia, or the end of the sixteenth century, at least as the sixteenth century was drawing to a close, the old dynasty of the Grand Princes of Moscow, or the Ruric dynasty was coming to an end. Sorr Ivan, better known as Ivan the Terrible, died in four and though he'd had a number of wives, countless lovers, and many many children, he really didn't have that many options for an air partly his own fault to right, so this is what happened. Many of the legitimate children that he had turned out to be sickly and they didn't survive Ivan. As for the illegitimate ones, it said that Ivan would actually suffocate them with his own hands to make sure there wasn't a power struggle after he died. Ironically, a power struggle does still develop. That's very true. There were two sons left after Ivan died, Fyodor and Dmitri. Fyodor was the older one, and he actually became czar after Ivan's death. He wasn't a very effective czar, though some sources suggest that he may have actually had some sort of mental disability or the very least was ill suited to ruling the country. So somebody else had to step in. His wife's brother, Boris Godonoff, who basically governed for him, and before his death, Ivan even named golden Off as Fyodor's guardian. So it's the start of trouble raising this this man to a very high, very powerful position, because Godanov had a lot of power now and it seemed like maybe he would be the next in line for the he own. And there was still that other son though, so this is where things get complicated. Dmitri Ivan's other legitimate child, but at this point he was just a little boy, so he didn't seem to be a real contender here as a successor to Feodor. Yeah, also, it might have been tough to prove Dmitri's legitimacy because he was the son of Ivan's seventh or maybe eighth wife, depending on what source you look at, and I think something like after the third wife, the kids weren't really considered legitimate, so that caused a problem anyway, but he still would have had a claim, So that's probably why Dmitri and his mother were exiled to oogly each after Ivan's death. But the boy died there in fifteen nine, around age eight or ten, and of course there are mysterious circumstances involved. It wouldn't be a good pretender story unless there were some mysterious circumstances, just a Russian royal childhood story. So some people said that the death was natural, although natural doesn't even really sound very good. He supposedly stabbed himself during an epileptic siege. Yeah, you have to wonder why an eight to ten year old boys holding a knife anyway, Yeah, that was my first question, and how he managed to stab himself with it, But there you go. That's the one potentially natural solution. However, though there was also a rumor that it was Godenov who had had the child, murdered, which seems kind of likely to this this power hungry guy who does step in after this kid is out of the way. But regardless of what the truth was here, Dmitri was now out of the picture. And since Fyodor had a wife and only one daughter, Fiodoja, who died as an infant, this really left the door wide open for Godonov to step up and take the throne himself. And incidentally, some suspected godenovil involvement in Fyodojia's death too, so we should mention that. But sure enough, after Fyodora's death in fift Godenov was elected to the throne by popular assembly. But czar Boris, as he's often known, didn't have an easy go of it at all. We shouldn't make it seem entirely like he just came in there and claimed the throne for himself too. He was elected to his position, but not everyone was a fan of the news are Boris, in particular the Bowyers, who are basically old aristocratic family's upper nobility. They were specifically opposed to him, and out of all of these old families, the Romanovs especially really didn't like czar Boris. And part of that is because they thought they had a better claim to the throne is our Feodor's mother Ivan the terribles first wife, Anastasia, had been a Romanov, so the family thought that through through her and through their relation to the latest are, they had a pretty good claim. So zar Boris needed a way to deal with these rivals of his and what he did is in sixteen hundred he sent them all. He arrested them, He arrested all the Romanov brothers and sent them all out of Moscow. That wasn't the end of zar boris troubles though, either, as soon other social classes weren't really happy with him. Though some sources referred as zar Boris as an intelligent and capable ruler who did things like reforming the judicial system and sending students to be educated in Western Europe, he also had the misfortune of being on the throne during a terrible famine that lasted from about sixteen o one to sixteen oh three. The harvest failed all those summers, three successive summers, and czar Boris really didn't deal with us effectively at all. It hurt his reputation and destabilized his regime. Yeah, so there was this idea floating around that Czar Boris wasn't a true czar at all. These economic problems, these social conflicts that were all coming to ahead, even the famine, it was all kind of his fault. And this, combined with Dmitri's premature death, opened the door for pretenders, so new guys could come in and and the stage was set for for some kind of revolution it was. And then in sixteen o three, at the height of this crisis in Russia, a young man appeared in Poland Lithuania and presented himself to Prince Adam and other nobles there as the Tsarevich Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan a Terrible and the true heir to the Russian throne. Wait a minute, yeah, what's going on here? Supposed to be dead, He's supposed to be dead. So here's how Dmitri explained himself. He told people that Gonov had sent hired assassins to kill him and Ogleach back in fift So what was rumored to have happened did happen. Gonov had tried to have him killed, but his tutor had saved him, or so Dmitri claimed. By cleverly substituting another boy for Dmitri, and that boy was killed instead of him. So sounds like a pretty interesting story. And according to an article in History Today by Marine Perry, this new Dmitri, who did receive an audience with the Polish king in sixteen o four, had some pet some proof for all of these tall claims. For one, he was recognized supposedly by Russian exiles who claimed to have known the boy. You know, that's not it's not too hard to believe. There are some people would have definitely been familiar with his face, might have been able to recognize him. They also displayed so called royal birthmarks, and we're not quite what that means. We're trying to figure out what that meant. What what makes a royal birthmark? Or I don't know, is it especially large or like shaped like a crown, or is it just as simple as maybe they knew Dmitri had some specific birthmark and look, there it is. But or maybe the family all had the same birthmark something. Anyways, he has the royal birthmark, so he's good there. And then he also had a jeweled cross that was allegedly given to him by his Godfather. So the Polish are sold on this, and they have pretty good reason to to be sold. After Dimitri even converted to Catholicism in Krakow, so now he's sort of entering their fold and they're getting their new friend Dimitri or hoping to get their new friend to meet Tree on the Russian throne, which offered some really exciting possibilities for the expansion of Poland's influence into Um into Russia and the Vatican's reach as well. So, backed by these Lithuanian and Polish nobles and some Jesuits too, and with a newly gathered army of Cossacks and adventurers, this False Dmitri invaded Russia in October sixteen o four, and he had some initial victories. He did all right at first. He attracted followers, especially in southern Russia, and he won some towns in that region in which the townspeople overthrew their governors in favor of him, and most of his supporters were Cossacks, townspeople, peasants, and bondsmen in general. Though False Dmitri was defeated militarily until Czar Boris suddenly dies in April of sixteen o five, Then the government army shifted its support to Dmitri. Game changer it was they didn't want to swear allegiance to Zar Boris's son Theodore. So after the army has switched to lead and says, then there's a popular uprising against the Godenovs that leads the boyers to also think, hey, we want to switch over to so they murder Boris's son and his wife and false Dmitri arrived triumphantly in Moscow in June six oh five and is proclaimed Tsar with all the support of all sections of Russian society. So he made it. I mean, I know we already told you he would in the introduction, but I still feel like you sort of don't see that coming. He actually he's a pretender who makes it happen. So Zar Dmitri is on the throne. But we still have no idea who this guy really is. Our Boris had accused him of being one grigory A Trepev, who was a member of the gentry who was linked to the house of the Romanovs and later became a monk and what was pretty much the most prestigious monastery in Moscow at the time, but Boris had accused a trepiv of being a renegade type of monk who dabbled in things like sorcery and was league with Satan, never a good thing, for that's about the worst thing that you can do. And um, other accounts though, sort of painted a different picture. They had him standing in in good standing at the monastery, and um he rose in the ranks remarkably quickly there and and just sort of had a good reputation. So it's interesting is that many historians also think that false Dmitri was a treep of and this is probably the most prevalent theory that's out there right now. But some people think that there are some some critics of this theory, I should say, think that there are some timing issues with this. That's one criticism that they have that throw it into question. For example, the monk might have actually been too old to pass for Dmitri. We don't actually have any birth records of him, so although people say that they were around the same age, we don't actually know that that's true. So there are some flaws in this theory. And according to a piece by Chester Dunning and the Slavic Review, one thing that many scholars agree on is that whoever false Dmitri really was, he must have been raised from childhood to believe that he was really Dmitri because he played the role so convincingly. So I find that really interesting because you think about pretenders, and I don't know, I think I often assume that it's just like a decision they make and then the next year they're pretending to be this person. Political decision or a decision of ambition. Almost right, But this might have been more of a long term plan. It's the ambition of somebody else, presumably some older person who's who's grooming this young man or young boy even to to eventually take a place it. It reminded me again of the Lambert Simnal episode exactly. Although what's interesting in Dmitri's case is that there there have been a small number of researchers over the years who have pursued the possibility that Tsarevich Dmitri really did survive as a young child, and that maybe this was the real Dimitri. Demitri is the real Dmitri? Yeah, I mean there were some things that they point to, like irregularities with a child's burial. They waited for a long time to bury him, so maybe the bodies were swapped or something like that. So who knows a good one, But in general most people believed that he was in fact an impostor, but he didn't act like one when he got on the throne. Well in that would also explained being raised from a very young age to to truly believe that he was the the Tsarevich. But although some consider him to be the puppet of Polish nobles who supported him, several sources really paint false Dmitri as a quote extremely intelligent and resourceful leader, or a well educated for a Russian czar, or well versed in statecraft, advanced in his thinking and reform minded, and even possessing a quote lively even passionate temperament. So it sounded like a lot of people were pretty pleased with what they got, even if, even if the circumstances behind this young man coming to the throne were unusual, to say the least, it seemed like he did a pretty good job once he was there, or at least he doesn't seem like a total pepp decent job. Richard Helly even described of Dmitri as quote one of the few really enlightened rulers Russia has ever had, and Dunning notes that some scholars have seen Demitri as a forerunner to Peter the Great. Some of the things that Zar Dmitri accomplished, in case you're interested, He lowered the tax burden and labor demands of the time. He also made plans for promoting education and science and Russia, and he worked to promote the effectiveness of the Russian army. Unfortunately, though, or at least unfortunately for False Dmitri, he didn't have that much time to to accomplish all of these things. Having a mind of his own really turned out to be his detriment, and he anchored a lot of people, especially a lot of these these nobles who weren't too two into it in the first place, you know what I'm saying. So one of the things he did that really angered a lot of people was that early conversion to Catholicism. He also married the daughter of a Polish Catholic nobleman named Marina, which really even further strengthened that connection. But he also did some other things that would have maybe upset the boyars of the time. He disrupted a lot of cultural norms. For example, he dressed and acted in informal or western ways. He didn't attend church services for many hours each day. He did, he did attend church services and go to functions and things like that, but he didn't do it maybe as for as long or he wasn't as involved as people hoped that he would be. He also didn't rest after the midday meal, which was customary, and he also didn't hide his disdain for the low level of education among Boyars. So maybe that's why after just a year as our false Dmitri falls victim to a Boyar plot on May seventeen, sixteen oh six, and after Dmitri's murder, the Boyars put Vassili Showiski, a man from an old Boyar family on the throne, one of their own, one of their own exactly, And this marked the beginning of a period of political crisis known in Russia as the time of Troubles. So we've we've told you in the beginning there were going to be a few of these false Dmitri. So now with this false Dmitri, the first out of the way, opens the door for for some new impostors to come in. Almost Immediately after the nobles pulled off this plot murdering Dmitri the Czar, rumors started circulating that Dmitri had yet again escaped death. Maybe these rumors were started by his wife, maybe some other supporter, and it took a while for for anything to come of that, but eventually the second False Dmitri did show up in July seven. He bore no physical resemblance to the first False Dmitri. He actually gained a following, though that didn't really seem to matter. He gained enough of a following, including Cossacks and Poles and Lithuanians and rebels, to cause the news are some real trouble and um it's it's. It gets even weirder than that, though, when you consider how far the support of this sect a False Dmitri went. He did gain a lot of support. He gained control of Southern Russia and set up headquarters at the village of Tushino, and that's why he's sometimes known as the Thief of Tushino. But the really crazy part here, to me at least, is that Marina False Dmitri, the first wife, recognizes the second false Dmitri as her husband, which gives him credibility. I mean, people think, obviously, if this woman says this is her husband, it must be true. Right. So they stayed together. They had a son eventually, who they named Ivan, and False Dmitri the second was eventually killed by one of his own followers in sixteen ten. No one to this day really knows who he was. He may have been a prett son or maybe a baptized Jew called Bogdanco. So with false Dmitri the second out of the way, we have an opening for false Dmitri the third, And on March sixteen eleven, a third False Dmitri does show up in northwest Russia. This time, but he I mean, I guess it was an old story. By this point, he really didn't gain quite as much of a following, and historians identify him as a former deacon. He did gain the alliance of, or the allegiance at least of some Cothics and a couple of towns, but he was also murdered by his own supporters May sixteen twelve. So that's the end of that immediate line of of Dmitries. But there were others that that followed, not necessarily more Dimitris, but other pretenders to the throne. It was a pretty wild time. There were many pretenders apparently during the seventeenth century in Russia, and there are several explanations for that out there. For example, Perry suggests that monarchism was the only political ideology that existed in early modern Russia. So leaders of rebellions or social movements or what have you, they were called the true's are and their enemies were considered traitors. And that's kind of how they set up that dichotomy. Wouldn't work today. I don't think, no, not at all. I mean, I think the widespread use of photography would have put a pretty fast end to this sort of thing. But the DNA paternity testing. You're not dmitri. But I mean, I do think that that's interesting that the only avenue open for them was forging some kind of legitimacy, saying that you are somehow related to the royal family in order to get a new political ideology or a new regime out there, or overthrow somebody you don't like. It's a it's a strange way about of going about things, I think. Comparing it to today, though, I think that's why we're so interested in this phenomenon is because it's just something we can't fathom. It seems so outrageous, how because something like this happened. So we do love a good pretender story. And I know a lot of people have been suggesting Bonnie Prince Charlie lately, and he has seriously been on my list of podcast topics for I think since I started in History. To day did an article on him recently, so so he's still up there. But if you have any other pretender suggestions too, they are so much fun to talk about, you can email them to us a history podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We're also on Twitter at Midston History and we're on Facebook. You can leave us the comment in any of those ways. And if you want to learn a little bit more about how royalty and royal families work, we do have an article called how Royalty Works on our website. You can look it up by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone up has a rise Download it today on iTunes,