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72 Muscovite subjects, or feared to shock their national and religious prejudices. He surrounded himself with Poles, and took for his wife the beauteous Marina, a Polish princess. To the horror of all pious Russians, and notwithstanding the remonstrance of the Church, this heretic and foreign woman was crowned tsarina before her marriage, before she had abjured the Roman faith or made profession of Orthodoxy. She encouraged Dimitri in the blind infatuation which led to his ruin. He threw off the dreary state and ceremony which hedged in the dignity of a tsar; mocked at pious superstitions, refusing to cross himself before the sacred images or to have his table blessed and sprinkled with holy water; partook of impure meats, and carelessly evinced his indifference towards the Church and his ignorance of ecclesiastical history. He tolerated Lutherans, and welcomed Jesuits at his court; allowed the erection of a Catholic church and the celebration of the Latin mass within the sacred precincts of the Kremlin. He graciously received apostolic benediction from the pope, and renewed his promise of abjuration.

A more serious act was the nomination of Ignatius, a foreigner, as patriarch. This prelate had been archbishop of Cyprus; exiled from his see, he had, on pretence of suffering for the faith, imposed upon the pious credulity of Feodor, and obtained the bishopric of Riazan. He was a Greek of wily, insinuating address, but of dubious orthodoxy, willing to be a pliant tool in his master's hands.

Popular discontent, artfully fomented by the nobles, who had favored the pretender only to compass the downfall of Godounov, stimulated by Dimitri's supposed intention to recognize the authority of the pope over the Church of Russia and to sacrifice national in-