Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/85

70 Old stories of Dimitri's assassination were revived, and suspicions became convictions; Boris was accused of having summoned the Tatars, that, in the danger to the empire, his crime might be forgotten; a terrible pestilence and famine was a token of divine wrath, and his beneficent measures to relieve the suffering were made a reproach. Discontent fed on calumny, and the countrywas ripe for revolt.

Godounov met the hostile feeling by harsh and tyrannical treatment of all who, from birth, rank, or influence, were objects of suspicion. The Romanoffs, who, from relationship with Anastasia, the virtuous wife of Ivan IV., shared the popular affection in which her memory was held, fell into disgrace. Their head, Feodor Niketitch, afterwards the celebrated patriarch Philaret, was forced into a monastery as a tonsured monk.

The apparition of Dimitri, claiming to be the son of Ivan IV., was the breeze which fanned into open flame the kindling embers of disaffection.

The Church remained loyal to the tsar, and hurled its anathema against the pretender as an unfrocked monk and arrant impostor, but the nobles and the people, weary of Boris's tyranny, hailed him as their deliverer and trueborn lord.

In 1603, by the influence of Claudio Rangoni, papal nuncio at the Polish court, Dimitri was acknowledged by King Sigismund as the rightful tsar. His apparition, at the moment when the struggle in Poland between Orthodoxy and the Unia was at its height, was most opportune for the Catholic party; money and men were promised him upon condition of his embracing the Latin faith; and he, nothing loath, agreed, but secretly, in order to avoid arousing the prejudices of his Russian subjects. Clement VII.VIII. [sic], rejoicing at the prospect of extend-