344 VASA
Unfortunately, the Time of Troubles in Muscovy is best known to the outside
world in caricatures deriving from Russian folk-history or from the stage of the
nineteenth-century opera:
Second Act: Throne room of King Sigismund. The King is celebrating his victory. The
Polish lords dream of occupying the rich Russian land... Carousing and confusion.
Sigismund directs a posse of his knights to bar Minin from the road to Moscow, to take
him prisoner, to destroy the villages and burn the towns - in short, to subjugate Russia.^16
In reality, matters were somewhat different. The idea that the Republic of
Poland-Lithuania, with its modest military resources and creaking finances,
could ever have contemplated 'occupying' or 'subjugating' the vastnesses of
Russia is preposterous. The Polish commanders, and especially Zolkiewski,
were consistently opposed to intervention; the Sejm was hostile towards inter-
vention; and the King only gave way to intervention on two brief occasions.^17
The Poles were only able to intervene at all because powerful factions among the
Muscovite boyars were pressing them to do so. And they had no clear plans
about the future. Whatever modern Poles may care to believe to bolster their
self-respect, there was never any war of conquest comparable to Napoleon's
campaign of 1812. Polish operations amounted to nothing more than a series of
minor adventures in a vast civil war.
In the early stages of the Troubles, the Republic as such played no part what-
soever. The first False Dmitri was privately managed by Jerzy Mniszek of
Sambor, Wojewoda of Sandomierz. He was schooled by Polish Jesuits, who per-
suaded the King to receive him at court and to smile on their devious schemes for
the sake of Faith. When, in 1605, like some latter-day Lambert Simnel, he had
actually been crowned in Moscow as the long-lost son of Ivan IV, his marriage
to Mniszek's daughter, Maryna (1588-1614), took place by proxy in Cracow. In
Zamoyski's opinion, it was 'a comedy worthy of Plautus or Terence'. It ended
when the remains of the murdered pretender, trampled to pulp by the Muscovite
mob, were fired to the four winds from a cannon on Red Square.
Thereafter, the Second False Dmitri, the 'thief of Tushino', the Perkin
Warbeck of the story, was adopted by yet another private consortium of Polish
and Lithuanian adventurers including Alexander Lisowski, Prince Roman
Rozynski, and Jan Sapieha, Starosta of Uswiat. It was they who recruited the
dowager Maryna to the altar once more, and whose unruly retainers laid siege
to Moscow from their camp at Tushino. It was they who inspired the memo-
rable memorial tablet at the Troitsko-Sergievskiy monastery at Zagorsk:
'THREE PLAGUES - TYPHUS, TARTARS, POLES.' Meanwhile, the
Tsardom had been assumed by Prince Vasili Shuyski. Only at this point did the
Polish Court begin to take an official interest. In the coup of 1606, at Shuyski's
instigation, some five hundred Poles from Mniszek's entourage had been mas-
sacred in Moscow. Worse still, Shuyski was putting out feelers for an alliance
with Charles IX of Sweden. Zygmunt III spurned the constitutional niceties and
the advice of the Sejm and decided to march - 'for the glory of the Republic'. An