At the end of April 1608 Dmitrii marched from Orel towards Bolkhov, where Tsar Vasilii's army, commanded by his brother, Prince Dmitrii Shuiskii, was encamped. Rozynski inflicted a major defeat on Shuiskii, and occupied Bolkhov, before advancing on the capital via Kozel'sk, Kaluga, Borisov and Mozhaisk. The pretender's troops set up camp in the village of Tushino, just outside Moscow. On 25 June they defeated Shuiskii again at Khodynka, but were unable to take the capital. Dmitrii entrenched himself at Tushino, where he was to remain until the end of the following year.
Although the Polish troops who had joined the pretender's camp had done so without the official sanction of King Sigismund, Tsar Vasilii hoped to persuade the king to put pressure on his fellow countrymen to leave Russia. In a treaty signed in July i608 Shuiskii agreed to release the Mniszechs and other Poles imprisoned in Russia; in return, Sigismund promised that all Polish troops at Tushino would be withdrawn. In practice, after their release the Mniszechs ended up at Tushino, where Marina was 'reunited' with her 'husband'; and not only did the Polish soldiers fail to leave Tushino, but others soon joined them. The most notable ofthe new arrivals was Jan-Piotr Sapieha, a nephew of the Lithuanian chancellor Leo Sapieha.
The initial successes of the pretender's troops undermined support for Tsar Vasilii in Moscow, and from the autumn of 1608 many boyars and noblemen transferred their allegiance to Tushino. Subsequently some of these men switched sides more than once (they were described by a contemporary as 'migratory birds'),[362] but Dmitrii managed to acquire a boyar duma and sovereign's court which included some eminent Muscovite aristocrats, including the Princes D. T. and Iu. N. Trubetskoi, and the boyar M. G. Saltykov. In October 1608 Metropolitan Filaret of Rostov (the former Fedor Nikitich Romanov) was brought to Tushino as a prisoner, and was appointed patriarch. Various kinsmen of the Romanovs - Prince A. Iu. Sitskii, Prince R. F. Troekurov and I. I. Godunov - became Tushino
boyars.[363]
At the end of September i608 Sapieha and his men left Tushino to lay siege to the great Trinity-Sergius monastery, north-east of the capital. The siege was to last until January 1610, and the heroic resistance of the defenders constituted one ofthe most celebrated episodes ofthe Time of Troubles. The rest of Dmitrii's army remained at Tushino. Their blockade of Moscow was not complete, since Riazan', to the south-east, remained loyal to Shuiskii, and supplies were able to enter the capital by the Riazan' road, which led through Kolomna.
In the autumn of 1608 Dmitrii's commanders concentrated on securing the allegiance of the towns which lay to the north and east of Moscow. Most of these towns recognised the pretender as a result of the use or threat of force by raiding parties from Tushino or from Sapieha's camp outside the Trinity monastery. Recent detailed research indicates that, contrary to the claims of some older historians, there is little evidence that popular uprisings in favour of Dmitrii took place in these towns. Pskov is a possible exception, but there the social conflicts pre-dated the formation of the Tushino camp and were in any case less polarised than the chronicle picture of 'little people' versus 'big people' suggests.[364]
By the end of i608, the only major cities to remain loyal to Shuiskii were Novgorod in the north-west and Smolensk in the west. On the Volga, Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan' were still held by Shuiskii's commanders, but overall Tsar Vasilii's position seemed fairly hopeless. At the beginning of i609 the Kolomna road was briefly blocked, impeding the supply of food to the capital from the Riazan' region. As food prices increased in Moscow, so did discontent with Shuiskii. In February some of his courtiers made an attempt to overthrow him, but the plot was thwarted, mainly as a result of Patriarch Germogen's stout defence of the tsar. The boyar I. F. Kriuk-Kolychev organised another conspiracy on Palm Sunday, but this was discovered and the ringleader was executed.
In many parts of northern Russia, support for the pretender turned out to be short-lived. In the north-west, Pskov continued to acknowledge 'Tsar Dmitrii', but the towns ofthe north-east began to revolt against him from the beginning of 1609 onwards. Kostroma rebelled against the Tushinites as early as December 1608, but there, and in Galich, the popular revolt was soon suppressed by Polish troops. The situation in many places was confused, with some towns changing sides more than once. The uprisings against the Tushinites were fuelled by the rapacity of the Poles and the cossacks, who imposed heavy taxes and other exactions on the townspeople, and sometimes resorted to blatant looting. Government propaganda also played a part. Shuiskii denounced Dmitrii as an impostor, and claimed that the Catholic Poles presented a threat to Orthodoxy; these assertions helped to gain him support. In most districts the anti-Tushino movement had a broad social base, comprising servicemen as well as townspeople and peasants.[365]
At the beginning of 1609 Shuiskii acquired additional forces from abroad. In August 1608 Tsar Vasilii had sent his nephew, Prince Michael Skopin-Shuiskii, to Novgorod to negotiate with Karl IX for Swedish military assistance against the Poles. In February i609 the Swedish commander Jacob Pontus de la Gardie arrived in Novgorod and concluded an agreement with Skopin-Shuiskii. In early May a combined Russian and Swedish army defeated troops that had been sent from Tushino against Novgorod. On 10 May Skopin-Shuiskii left Novgorod to march on Moscow and lift the siege of the capital. News of his advance encouraged those northern towns which still recognised Dmitrii to transfer their allegiance to Tsar Vasilii; but Pskov held out, in spite of an attempt by Prince Michael's forces to capture the town on 18 May. In July 1609 Skopin occupied Tver', and then moved east to link up with the troops sent by the north-eastern towns. At Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda they awaited the arrival of the boyar Fedor Sheremetev, who had been liberating the Volga towns to the south-east. Sheremetev had left his camp outside Astrakhan' in the autumn of 1607, and had gradually moved up the Volga. He reached Nizhnii Novgorod in the spring of 1609, and joined Skopin-Shuiskii at Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda towards the end of that year.
In the summer of 1609 King Sigismund, angered by Swedish support for Shuiskii, decided to intervene directly in the Russian civil war in order to obtain the Muscovite throne either for himself or for his son Wladyslaw. In September he laid siege to Smolensk. The Poles who were encamped at Tushino did not welcome Sigismund's action, and sent envoys to Smolensk to try to dissuade the king from his undertaking. But Sigismund in his turn made a bid for the support of the Tushinites. A delegation from Smolensk arrived at Tushino in December 1609 to conduct negotiations with RoZyiiski. The pretender was excluded from these talks. Fearing treachery, and aware that Skopin-Shuiskii's army was now close to Moscow, Dmitrii fled to Kaluga.
The pretender's flight demoralised and divided the Tushino encampment. Some of the Russians defected to Shuiskii in Moscow; some returned to their homes; while others followed Dmitrii to Kaluga. In January 1610 Jan- Piotr Sapieha abandoned the siege of the Trinity monastery and retreated to Dmitrov, where Marina Mniszech joined him from Tushino. Marina subsequently moved to Kaluga to be reunited with Dmitrii, while Sapieha retreated further west after Dmitrov fell to Skopin-Shuiskii's forces. At the end of January 1610 a group of Russian boyars at Tushino sent a delegation to Smolensk, headed by M. G. Saltykov, who agreed terms with King Sigismund on 4 February for the offer of the Russian throne to Prince Wladyslaw. Finally, on 6 March Rozynski burned the Tushino camp to the ground and withdrew its remaining occupants to Volokolamsk.
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