The last Louis, baby False Dmitry, the Orthodox son-in-law of the French king: How children died in an adult struggle for power

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

The struggle for power has never spared children. In the eyes of their parents' political opponents, girls and boys were simply an obstacle to power or a means that could be used by enemies. At best, princes and princesses, princes and princesses, became fugitives who lost their homeland, like the Iranian or Greek dynasties. But often the cases were far worse; here are just three of them.

The last Louis

The son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was unlucky to be born four years before the French Revolution. At eight years old, a boy named Louis Charles was orphaned, and all the powers of Europe recognized him as king of France. It didn't help Louis himself.

The beginning of his life is marked by a mysterious entry in the diary of King Louis: “The birth of the queen. Birth of the Duke of Normandy. Everything went the same as with my son. It seems that the king had reason to believe that little Louis was the fruit of a love that was not at all conjugal. Many consider the Swedish nobleman von Fersen to be Marie Antoinette's lover. However, the prince was very similar to the king's younger brother, so doubts are most likely unfounded.

Marie Antoinette considered her son a dreamer and stubborn, but noted his kindness - Louis always tried to share toys and goodies with his sister - and his amazing loyalty to his word for age. The kid himself grew roses in the garden to give them to his mother and learned the sciences quickly and easily.

After the execution of the king and queen, the Jacobins decided to defiantly raise from the boy Louis Capet (as he was now officially called) an ordinary and useful citizen. But to begin with, they knocked out a signature from him under the testimony that his mother corrupted him. The prince resisted for a long time, claiming that he was being treated illegally. They beat him, poured vodka into his mouth, did not allow him to sleep or eat. By the time Louis was sent for re-education, he was already psychologically broken.

Raised Louis right in prison. An elderly shoemaker Antoine Simon and his wife became his guardians. The guardians approached the matter responsibly. As a political education, the shoemaker constantly demanded that the prince glorify the republic and curse the murdered mother and father. To knock out the nonsense, the boy was forced to drink a lot of cheap wine and was beaten for any offense, for example, for the statement that the republic cannot be eternal, because only God is eternal. At the same time, he was taught shoemaking and … toys were bought. The guardians treated the prince in the same way that many parents of their class in France treat children.

But soon this society was also deprived of Louis. The boy turned from being educated into an ordinary prisoner. The guards brought him food and water, but no one cared about Louis having something to wash or read. The parasha was not changed for a long time, candles were brought in from time to time. At some point, the boy began to rave in the dark. He died shortly thereafter.

Although there were rumors of a murder, the cause of his death was more mundane. The doctor discovered that ten-year-old Louis was covered from head to toe with lice and their bites, his body had a lot of damage from the beatings he had suffered, he himself was extremely skinny from malnutrition and lack of movement, but he finished off his tuberculosis.

Ivan Vorenok

Marina Mnishek never wanted to go to Moscow. She was persuaded for a long time by her father and the first False Dmitry. She was seduced not only by the future title of queen, but also by the opportunity to go down in history as the baptizer of Russia to Catholicism - just as Jadviga baptized the Lithuanians. In Moscow, as you know, everything went wrong. Marina's husband was killed, kidnapped on the way home and married to the unloved False Dmitry II. When Marina's son was born and her second husband died, she had already endured so much that only the title of Queen Mother began to seem to her a worthy payment for all misfortunes.

All Marina's hope was for a new love, the Cossack Zarutsky, who saved her at a dangerous moment when her second husband fled without hesitation. Zarutsky swore allegiance to Marina's son Ivan as tsar and honestly tried to get him the throne with Cossack sabers. The idea was not just a failure. After Marina and four-year-old Vanya were caught, the boy was hanged in front of his mother near the Serpukhov Gate. The rope turned out to be too thick and frozen to strangle the boy, and his body was too small for his neck to break under the weight, so the child died of hypothermia, sagging for several hours in the cold.

Alexey and Anna

The son of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus himself took the throne at the age of eleven. Before, to approve his majority, young Alexei was married to a nine-year-old French princess Agnes, in Orthodoxy Anna. Both Alexei and Anna were clearly too small for the roles of the emperor and empress, and Alexei's uncle Andronic took advantage of the situation.

To begin with, he fabricated a case against the mother of the Emperor Mary. Alexei was literally forced to sign a decree on her imprisonment in a monastery. After that, Andronicus raised an armed coup, killed his fourteen-year-old nephew at that time and took his place. For several months after the murder, Andronicus, according to legend, kept the severed head of Alexei and admired it. When he got tired of the toy, his head flew into the waters of the Bosphorus.

The twelve-year-old widow empress Andronicus tried to marry his son Manuel, but he firmly refused. Then the sixty-five-year-old man took Agnes as his wife himself. In Europe, this caused a huge scandal, but France remained silent. The girl was very afraid of her new husband, although Andronicus tried to please her: he gave luxury goods and showed concern. When Agnes was widowed two years later, she probably breathed a sigh of relief.

See also: Prison and execution that overtook princes and princesses before any revolution.