Cardinal Richelieu as a man of the era: What happened during his reign in the world and in Russia

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Three Musketeers was one of the most popular books among children born in the USSR. But few people thought at the time of what events the book takes place. For example, that in the same year when young d'Artagnan entered Paris, the first clock was installed on the Spasskaya Tower of the Moscow Kremlin in Moscow.

Both D'Artagnan and all three Musketeers have real historical prototypes. True, from them and their real destinies, horns and legs remained in the text. Cardinal Richelieu is spelled out more carefully, closer to the historical prototype. If you look at what era the book was written about, then it is better to rely on it. As you know, the cardinal became Prime Minister of France in 1624 and left his post only with his death in 1942. At the time of D'Artagnan's arrival in the capital, he was less than forty, King Louis XIII and Queen Anne of Austria were twenty-three each, the Duke of Buckingham was thirty-three. It is not so easy to mentally tie Richelieu to what exactly happened in Russia, Asia or America, if you have not already asked this question before. But a small overview of events will help organize the whole era in your head.

Regal women

During Richelieu's service as prime minister, women held the throne or ruled for a long time in several parts of the world. In the memory of the cardinal, the legendary Swedish Queen Christina, a great lover of natural sciences, menswear and young bachelors, was born and ascended the throne - as a six-year-old girl. Alas, it was under Christine that Sweden passed anti-Roma laws - one of the last in Europe.

In African Angola, the first baptized Queen Anne I fought with the Portuguese. Now the Angolans revered her as one of their greatest monarchs, several monuments have been erected to her, and she is usually called by her native name Nzinga Mbandi Ngola. She became queen in the same year in which the cardinal received his office.

In Japan, after the abdication of her father, the seventh and first in several hundred years empress of the country ascended to the throne under the throne name Meisho (which can be conditionally translated as the Bright Future). She, like the Swedish queen Christina, was six years old at the time of her accession to the throne. Naturally, the abdicated father actually ruled for her. When Meisho became an adult (a year after Richelieu's death), her father forced her to surrender the throne to her brother and go to a monastery.

In Turkey, the official ruler, meanwhile, was the juvenile Sultan Murad IV, and on his behalf his mother openly ruled, Kosem-Sultan - a European who was once brought to Turkey as a young slave. Alas, history has not preserved her name. She turned out to be not the strongest ruler - she was never trained for this role, so riots and banditry flourished in the country every now and then. Growing up, Murad, who actually took power in 1632, as a result, involuntarily became the bloodiest sultan in the history of the empire. He constantly had to suppress rebellions, not to mention the need for a large number of demonstrative executions of robbers.

Meanwhile in Russia

The same Murad was in correspondence with the first Russian tsar of the Romanovs, Mikhail Fedorovich. In 1637, the Don Cossacks united with the Zaporozhian Cossacks and took the city of Azov. The outraged sultan sent a letter to the king, in which he complained about the violation of his borders. The tsar expressed complete solidarity with the Sultan in this indignation - which did not prevent him from later secretly supplying gunpowder to the Cossacks in Azov and sending money. Nevertheless, in parallel, he wrote an official letter to the Cossacks with reproaches.

During Richelieu's premiership, by the way, the tsar's heir was born, the future Alexei Tishaishy (in 1629), who was raised, if possible, in a European manner - with German toys, in European clothes, according to Lithuanian textbooks. During the same period, Russia managed to make war with Poland. Specifically - with King Vladislav IV. Once, after the deposition of Vasily Shuisky, he was invited to the royal throne in Moscow on the condition that he would accept Orthodoxy. Vladislav even managed to take the boyar oath as a Russian tsar, but he never accepted Orthodoxy and, as a result, did not receive the Russian crown. This did not prevent him, until 1934 (the end of the war with Tsar Mikhail), stubbornly calling himself the Russian Tsar, and accusing Romanov of imposture. By the way, Bohdan Khmelnitsky fought on the side of Vladislav with Mikhail.

In memory of Richelieu the Minister, Patriarch Filaret (by the way, the father of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich) commissioned the compilation of the "New Chronicler" - the official history of the Russian state from the end of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, and the Moscow printing house published the first primer in Russia.

In science

The scholars of the day to the cardinal were very fruitful. The constellations Unicorn and Giraffe first appeared in the German atlas of the starry sky. English mathematician Henry Briggs published logarithmic tables with decimal logarithms - they will then be called "Briggs logarithms" for a long time. Soon, a circular slide rule was created, and also in England. The glass liquid thermometer and steam turbines were also invented during Richelieu's premiership. And in Turkey, the inventor Ahmed Chelebi was the first to fly on wings.

It was during the time of the intriguing cardinal that mathematical signs appeared, first in England, to which we are accustomed to school: the multiplication sign in the form of an oblique cross, the division sign in the form of a slash, symbols of parallelism and perpendicularity. Fermat formulated his "Great Theorem", and its proof will be found only in 1994. In the same years, Descartes and Pascal wrote their works.

Galileo Galilei published his famous work on the structure of the solar system and soon found himself before the court of the Inquisition. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but, due to the venerable age of the scientist, he was replaced by life with house arrest. Galileo was lucky: in France since 1624, anyone who tries to refute Aristotle's views on the structure of the universe faces the death penalty. Already under arrest, Galileo published a new treatise, which laid the foundations of modern mechanics.

In Asia

It was during Richelieu's premiership (although he had nothing to do with it) in Japan, there was a famous Christian uprising led by a teenage boy Shiro, in baptism - Jerome. The uprising was associated with mass torture of Christian peasants, whom the masters forced to renounce their new faith. It was suppressed by government troops with the help of the Dutch, and after the uprising in Japan, the presence of all Europeans was banned, as well as European literature and any Chinese texts mentioning Europeans. For their loyalty to the local authorities, the Dutch were allowed to trade on a small island, and only on it. Shiro's boy's head was cut off. Before his death, he managed to write a haiku: "Now those who were with me in the besieged castle will become my friends in another world."

Spain allowed Mexico, which was at that time its colony, to have its own colony - the Philippines. The Manchus invaded Korea and quickly subjugated it. The last emperor of the Chinese Ming dynasty, Chongzhen, executed, because of his suspiciousness, a loyal general who single-handedly held back the advance of the Manchus, and this was one of his biggest steps towards his own ending.

Africa, America, India and Europe

In the Congo, which has been a Christian power for a hundred years, during one term, Richelieu changed six kings in his post - due to palace coups. Emperor Malak Sagad III of Ethiopia converted to Catholicism and began to impose it, often forcibly, throughout the country. Rebellions and troubles began, and the emperor had to declare freedom of religion.

Nevertheless, his position was seriously shaken and it came to abdication in favor of his son, whose throne name was Alam Sagad. The new emperor soon expelled all Catholic monks and priests from his land because of the atrocities committed by Europeans in other African countries. The last straw was the military seizure of a large Kenyan city by the Portuguese.

British colonists have landed on the American coast. Local Indians helped them survive by providing food and teaching. For this, the colonists gave them a thank-you dinner at the earliest opportunity, initiating the Thanksgiving tradition. After a while, they also exterminated these Indians, because they did not like it when their lands were taken from them and women were raped. In the era of Richelieu's premiership, several future states of the United States were actually founded. The cardinal himself was engaged in the colonization of Canada, moreover, he made sure that there were exclusively Catholics among the colonists. The Duchy of Courland tried to colonize the island of Tobago, but, in short, it did not have enough strength.

The Dutch founded New Amsterdam in America and Madras (now Chennai) in India. In general, India was seriously bitten by the European powers, although local dynasties also held on, for example, the representative of the Mughal family Shah Jahan, the son of the poet Nur Jahan, ruled. It was he who built the Taj Mahal.

Holland experienced Tulipomania - a general madness, when huge sums of money were given for tulip bulbs or even killed. A revolution took place in England, everything was as it should be - with the beheading of the king. The Swedes launched a giant ship, which immediately sank to the bottom. The first newspaper was published in Italy. Soon, the king of France, together with his cardinal, also began to publish a newspaper, where they wrote under pseudonyms. And in the Polish forest, the last tour on Earth died - an animal that we now know only from the "Word of Igor's Campaign."

Richelieu is not the only politician who was a man of the era: What happened in Europe and Asia when Ivan the Terrible ruled in Russia.