Simeon Bekbulatovich

The son of Bek-Bulat , the Sultan of the Nogai Horde , a descendant of Genghis Khan , in official documents was called the Astrakhan prince. In the late 60s, Ivan the Terrible made him khan in Kasimov . He takes part in the Livonian War , in campaigns of 1571-1573 under Oreshek , Paide , Kolyvan . Under his province and Prince I.F. Mstislavsky, the Russian army was utterly defeated at Koloveri (Lode) .

In July 1573, at the insistence of Ivan IV, Sain-Bulat was baptized with the name Simeon in the village of Kushalino . That same summer, he married the widowed Princess Anastasia Cherkasskaya, the daughter of Prince Ivan Fedorovich Mstislavsky , the former head of the Zemstvo . She was a relative of the royal family, the blood of Sofia Paleolog flowed in her veins. In marriage they had six children: three sons - Fedor, Dmitry, John and three daughters: Evdokia, Maria, Anastasia. These were the last descendants of Ivan III and Sofia Paleolog , known from written sources.

Simeon Bekbulatovich probably outlived all of his children and his wife, sheared a nun in the name of Alexandra and died on June 7, 1607 . She was buried in the Simon Monastery , the family tomb of the princes of Mstislavsky.

In 1575, Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich “abdicated” the throne and elevated Simeon Bekbulatovich to it. This fall, in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin, Simeon was planted by Ivan the Terrible on the kingdom:

“... he planted Simeon Bekbulatovich as a king in Moscow and crowned him with a royal crown, and he called himself Ivan of Moscow and left the city, lived on Petrovka; the king’s entire rank was given to Simeon, and he traveled simply, like a boyar, in shafts ... ” ^[2]

Simeon presided over the Duma of the Zemsky boyars and issued government decrees on his behalf. Simeon lived in Moscow, surrounded by a lush courtyard, while Grozny settled in a modest setting on Petrovka. In his letters to Simeon, Ivan the Terrible observed the derogatory formulas adopted by the subject to the tsar: “Sovereign Grand Duke Semion Bekbulatovich of all Russia, Ivanets Vasiliev with his children, with Yvanets and Fedorts, they beat people with brow” ^[3] . Formally, the country was divided into the possessions of Grand Duke Simeon and the “inheritance” of Ivan, but in fact, Ivan Vasilievich remained the ruler of the state.

There are different versions of why this “political masquerade” was needed (as defined by V. O. Klyuchevsky and S. F. Platonov ), in which Ivan the Terrible continued to maintain power. A contemporary of events, the English ambassador Giles Fletcher claimed that in this way Ivan was able to confiscate church property on behalf of the new king, as if disagreeing with it himself: ^[4]

By the end of the year, he forced the new sovereign to select all the letters granted to bishops and monasteries, which the latter had been using for several centuries. All of them were destroyed. After being dissatisfied with such an act and the bad rule of the new sovereign, he took the scepter again and seemed to allow the church and the clergy to renew the letters that he had already distributed from himself, holding and adding to the treasury as much land as he liked.

Other assumptions (foreign policy necessity, fear of Ivan the Terrible with certain predictions that supposedly prophesied “death for the Moscow Tsar” for this year, the need for increased terror , etc.) have not been proved. There is a version that the abdication of Grozny was associated with a serious internal crisis:

“Apparently, the tsar and his entourage puzzled for a long time about how, without the consent of the Duma, to revive the oprichnik regime and at the same time maintain the semblance of legality in the Russian state, while the penchant for jokes and hoaxes did not prompt the tsar with the right decision.” ^[5]

According to Donald Ostrovsky, Ivan chose Simeon for the reason that the latter was a representative of the Genghisides , and therefore had the necessary authority in the system of political representations of that time - especially if the news of Daniel Prince about the upcoming the conspiracy of the boyars against Ivan the Terrible with the aim of seizing the Crimean Khan Devlet-Geray , another representative of the Genghisids clan, on the Moscow throne ^[6] . Ostrovsky's theory, however, did not find the support of other specialists ^{[7] [8]} .

Simeon Bekbulatovich spent 11 months by the Grand Duke of All Russia. Famous letters of honor written on his behalf. In August 1576, Ivan Vasilievich returned to the throne, and he granted Tsar Simeon the Grand Duchy of Tver with the title of Grand Duke of Tver . In 1580, according to the scribe book of the main possessions of Simeon, there were 13,500 acres of arable land. Simeon had his grand-ducal court - his orders, his boyars and captains, a palace in Tver and a permanent residence in the rich village of Kushalino . He disposed of the lands granted to him almost autocratically, had a special right to judge and favor “his people”. After 1585, however, sources cease to call him “the Grand Duke of Tver,” which, according to historians, indicates the loss of title.

After the death of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, noble families claiming power decided to consolidate around Simeon against Boris Godunov . Godunov was forced to take action. Kissing the cross to the new Tsar Boris Godunov, each boyar had to promise "Tsar Simeon Bekbulatovich and his children and no one else you want to see the kingdom of Moscow ...". During the reign of Boris Godunov, Simeon was deprived of his inheritance and reduced to one of the Tver estates - he was exiled to live in the Tver village of Kushalino . In 1605, oaths to the son of Godunov, Fedor II, made the same commitment. Simeon became impoverished, blinded (there are a number of versions in favor of the fact that he was blinded according to the instructions of Boris Godunov, the Nikon Chronicle : “Put the enemy into Boris’s heart and from him (Simeon) be horrified ... and make him blind)” and lived in poverty. After the election of Boris Godunov to the kingdom, his opponents led agitation in favor of Simeon, and the frightened Boris exiled him to a remote city. The former Orthodox Muslim became a zealous Orthodox Christian. He began to squander his savings on the construction of churches and on contributions to monasteries, he sent particularly rich deposits to Solovki .

False Dmitry I tonsured Simeon as a monk under the name of Elder Stephen in the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery ( 1606 ), where his father-in-law, Elder Jonah, had finished his days twenty years earlier. Vasily Shuisky in the same year ordered him to be exiled to Solovki. All this time he sent letters to the capital with a request to return him to the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery. In 1612 he was returned to Kirillov. He died on January 5 ( 15 ), 1616 and was buried next to his wife in Simon Monastery . There was an inscription on the tombstone: “In the summer of 7124, on 5th day, the servant of God, Simeon Bekbulatovich, became a foreign servant to the schema of Stephen.” Today, on the site of the monastery is the ZIL Culture Palace , the grave has been lost ^[9] .

• Shikman A.P. Figures of Russian History. Biographical reference. - M., 1997.
• Big Encyclopedia, vol. 17. - St. Petersburg.: Enlightenment, without date (no earlier than 1903).

• Vernadsky G.V. Moscow kingdom. - I. The foundation of the Russian Eurasian Empire (5 part). - Ch. 5. The consequences of the oprichnina and the end of the Livonian war
• Kasimov "kingdom" // project "Chronos"