tears of joy as the son of Ivan and of
St. Vladimir, the seventh wife of Ivan the Terrible even recognizing
and embracing him as her son! But Dmitri had not the wisdom to keep
what his cunning had won. His Polish wife came, followed by a suite of
Polish Catholics, who began to carry things with a high hand. The
clergy was offended and soon enraged. In five years Dmitri was
assassinated, and his mutilated corpse was lying in the palace at the
Kremlin, an object of insult and derision; and then, for Russia there
came another chaos.

For a brief period Vasili Shuiski, head of one of the princely
families, reigned, while two more "false Dmitris" appeared, one from
Sweden and the other from Poland. The cause of the latter was upheld
by the King of Poland, with the ulterior purpose of bringing the
disordered state of Russia under the Polish crown, and making one great
Slav kingdom with its center at Cracow.

So disorganized had the State become that some of the Princes had
actually opened negotiations with Sigismund with a view to offering the
crown to his son. But when Sigismund with an invading army was in
Moscow (1610), and when Vasili Shuiski was a prisoner in Poland, and a
Polish Prince was claiming the title of Tsar, there came an
awakening--not among the nobility, but deep down in the heart of
orthodox Russia. From this awakening of a dormant national sentiment
and of the religious instincts of the people there developed that
event,--the most health-restoring which can come to the life of a
nation,--a national uprising in which all classes unite in averting a
common disaster. What disaster could be for Russia more terrible than
an absorption into Catholic Poland? The Polish intruders and
pretenders were driven out, and then a great National Assembly gathered
at Moscow (1613) to elect a Tsar.

The name of Romanoff was unstained by crime, and was by maternal
ancestry allied to the royal race of Rurik. The newly awakened
patriotism turned instinctively toward that, as the highest expression
of their hopes; and Mikhail Romanoff, a youth of 16, was elected Tsar.

It was in 1547 that Anastasia, of the House of Romanoff, had married
Ivan IV. At about the same time her brother was married to a Princess
of Suzdal, a descendant of the brother of Alexander Nevski. This
Princess was the grandmother of Mikhail Romanoff, and the source from
which has sprung the present ruling house in Russia.

CHAPTER XIII