1. Shakespeare, William, Cymbeline, in The Complete Works (New York, 1977), 2.5.4-6.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 5.5.366.

3. K. V. Chistov writes that although royal pretenders have appeared elsewhere, “no country but Russia has known such frequent royal imposture or seen it play such a significant role in the history of the people and the state.” Chistov, K. V., Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy XVII-XIX vv. (Moscow, 1967), 29.Google Scholar See also Perrie, Maureen, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles (Cambridge, Eng., 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Uspenskij, Boris, “Tsar and Pretender: Samozvanchestvo, or Royal Imposture in Russia as a Cultural-Historical Phenomenon,” in Lotman, Iu. M. and Uspenskii, B. A., The Semiotics of Russian Culture, ed. Shukman, Ann (Ann Arbor, 1984), 259-92Google Scholar; Longworth, Philip, “The Pretender Phenomenon in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Past & Present, no. 66 (February 1975): 61-83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Troitskii, S. M., “Samozvantsy v Rossii XVII-XVIII vv.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 3 (1969): 134-46.Google Scholar

4. Uspenskii, “Tsar and Pretender,” 264.

5. Ibid., 264-65.

6. During the antiburial of False Dmitrii I, the coin traditionally placed in the mouth of a dead man was replaced by a reed pipe; since musical instruments were considered the inverse of icons, as the False Dmitrii was considered an anti-tsar, this suggests that the coin was perceived as a kind of icon. See Uspenskii, “Tsar and Pretender,” 291. Another anecdote relating coins with holy images, and, conversely, false coins with sacrilegious images, is the report of a traveller in the 1650s: “when they showed brand-new rubles to their Russian interlocutors, the latter respectfully kissed the Tsar's representation; but a regular taler or a ‘levok’ [a countermarked billon taler] they threw away in disgust, and never failed to spit on it!” Spassky, I. G., The Russian Monetary System: A Historico- Numismatic Survey, trans. Gorishina, Z. I. and Forrer, L. S., rev. ed. (Amsterdam, 1967), 120.Google Scholar Although doubtless exaggerated (such coins were in common circulation and given official countermarks), the report suggests that the images on coins might have belonged to the spectrum of venerated images. Icons were themselves often decorated with coins, and in some eighteenth-century Ukrainian icons, images of coins are painted directly onto the wood. See Spasskii, I. G., “Neobychnyi numizmaticheskii pamiatnik,” Numizmatika i sfragistika 2 (1965): 35-51.Google Scholar

7. Oreshnikov, A. V., Russkie monety do 1547 goda (Moscow, 1896), coin nos. 136-45.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., coin nos. 266,667,668. One bilingual coin bears the Muscovite prince's name in Cyrillic on one side and the name of the moneyer in Latin script on the reverse; other Muscovite coins pairing ruler and moneyer are in Cyrillic on both obverse and reverse. Two Pskov coins (nos. 80, 85) also refer to the moneyer by name. On the coupling of the issuing prince and the mintmaster, see Chernetsov, A. V., Types on Russian Coins of the XIV and XV Centuries: An Iconographic Survey, trans. Bartlett Wells, H. (Oxford, 1983), 97-98.Google Scholar

9. The homology between these two binomial structures is illustrated by the inscription on one Moscow coin, “RARAI,” which has been interpreted sometimes as naming a moneyer and sometimes as a garbled version of the name of a Mongol suzerain. Oreshnikov, Russkie monety, coin no. 507. Compare Oreshnikov's interpretation to Thomas S. Noonan, “Forging a National Identity: Monetary Politics during the Reign of Vasilii I,” in A. M. Kleimola and G. D. LenhofF, eds., Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359-1584 (Moscow, 1997), 503.

10. Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, 39 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1872-1927; hereafter RIB), 13:393. Some pretenders surrounded themselves with entire substitute families; for example, an eighteenth-century man not only represented himself as Peter III but called his mother the Empress Elizabeth. This man was also considered by his followers to be Jesus Christ and his mother the Virgin Mary, a phenomenon bound up with the myth of the tsar as Christ—a religious dimension to royal imposture that this footnote cannot deal with in depth. See Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 225-26Google Scholar; and Uspenskii, “Tsar and Pretender,” 260-62, for analysis of this point. Pretenders claiming to be the real Aleksei Petrovich, son of Peter I, appeared even during the prince's lifetime, which, according to Uspenskii, “testifies to the fact that viewing Peter as a ‘substituted’ Tsar could be transferred to his son: in as much as Peter is seen as a false Tsar, his son may be seen as the false heir.” Uspenskii, “Tsar and Pretender,” 277.

11. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, trans. Jacobson, Claire and Schoepf, Brooke Grundfest (New York, 1963), 83.Google Scholar

12. Osteen, Mark and Woodmansee, Martha, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction,” in Osteen, Mark and Woodmansee, Martha, eds., New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (London, 1999), 36, 22.Google Scholar

13. This correspondence has itself been accused of being a counterfeit, but I follow the main stream of scholarship in treating the letter discussed here as genuine. See Halperin, Charles J., “Edward Keenan and the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence in Hindsight,” Jahrbü:cher für Geschichte Osteuropas 46, no. 3 (1998): 376-403.Google Scholar

14. Martin, Janet, Medieval Russia, 980-1584 (Cambridge, Eng., 2007), 367.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a full treatment of boyar succession, see Kollmann, Nancy Shields, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345-1547 (Stanford, 1987).Google Scholar

15. Martin, , Medieval Russia, 374-76.Google Scholar

16. The Correspondence between Prince A. M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, 1564-1579, ed. and trans. J. L. I. Fennell (Cambridge, Eng., 1955), 15; Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem Kurbskim, ed. la. S. Lur'e and Iu. D. Rykov (Leningrad, 1979), 12-13. I quote from Fennell's English translation, with parallel citations to the later Russian edition edited by Lur'e and Rykov.

17. The point is rephrased in similar terms in Ivan IV's second letter of 1577. Perepiska, 166.

18. Correspondence, 179; Perepiska, 52.

19. See Uspenskii, , “Tsar and Pretender,” 260; and Priscilla Hunt, “Ivan IV's Personal Mythology of Kingship,” Slavic Review 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 771-74Google Scholar. Compare the western European use of Christological parallels to ground the primogenitary presumption that “father and son are one according to the fiction of the law.” Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), 391.Google Scholar

20. Correspondence, 77; Perepiska, 28.

21. Mikhailova, I. B., Sluzhilye liudi Severo-Vostochnoi Rusi v XlV-pervoipolovine XVI veka: Ocherki sotsial'noi istorii (St. Petersburg, 2003), 102.Google Scholar

22. On boyar abuses of the service class during Ivan's minority, see Hellie, Richard, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. I have slightly literalized Fennell's translation.

24. Mel'nikova, , Russkie monety, 17 Google Scholar; PSRL 26.323; and Litsevoi letopisnyi svod Ivana Groznogo. Rus’ (1537-1549gg. ot V.Kh.), vol. 27, bk. 19,437-38, Runiverse, at http://www.runivers.ru/upload/iblock/fec/LLS19.pdf (last accessed November 30,2015).

25. Dukhovnye i dogovornye gramoty velikikh i udel'nykh kniazei XIV-XVI vv., ed. L. V. Cherepnin and S. V. Bakhrushin (Moscow, 1950; hereafter DDG), 361. Efforts to limit coinage in appanage principalities are discernable as far back as the reign of Vasilii I. See Noonan, “Forging a National Identity,” 508.

26. On coinage and state control, see, e.g., Deng, Stephen, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (New York, 2011), 52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the extended argument in Ure, P. N., The Origin of Tyranny (New York, 1962).Google Scholar On primogeniture, see, e.g., Martin, , Medieval Russia, 237-38Google Scholar; Majeska, George, “The Moscow Coronation of 1498 Reconsidered,” Jarbucherfur Geschichte Osteuropas 26, no. 3 (1978): 358 Google Scholar; and Presniakov, A. E., The Formation of the Great Russian State: A Study of Russian History in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Moorhouse, A. E. (Chicago, 1970), 314-15.Google Scholar

27. Martin, , Medieval Russia, 221.Google Scholar

28. On coinage's dual role of advertising political aspirations and reflecting political realities of subordination, see Noonan, “Forging a National Identity,” 495.

29. Oreshnikov, Russkie monety, coin no. 448. Rus’ had been entirely surrounded by coin-using economies from the twelfth century, when coins were struck in Crimea and by the Volga Bulgars; East Slavic princes had briefly experimented with coin in the late tenth century, but mintage was discontinued less than 50 years after the first issue. See Ianin, V. L., “Den'gi i denezhnye sistemy,” in Artsikhovskii, A. V., ed., Ocherki Russkoi kul'turyXIII-XVvekov (Moscow, 1969), 324, 333Google Scholar; and Ianin, V. L., Denezhno-vesovye sistemy russkogo srednevekov'ia: Domongol'skiiperiod (Moscow, 1956), 169.Google Scholar

30. Novgorodskaia pervaia letopis, ed. A. N. Nasonov (Moscow, 1950), 414.

31. DDG, 9-10.

32. Martin, Medieval Russia, 263

33. DDG, 34.

34. For an extended treatment of this topic, see Craig Kennedy, “Fathers, Sons, and Brothers: Ties of Metaphorical Kinship between the Muscovite Grand Princes and the Tatar Elite,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, no. 19 (January 1995): 292-301.

35. PSRL, 11:183.

36. As the scribe might have known, Vitovt's vassal princes, including the Russian rulers of Chernigov and Smolensk, did mint coins with Vitovt's heraldic emblem on the reverse.

37. See Alef, Gustave, “The Political Significance of the Inscriptions on Muscovite Coinage,” Speculum 34, no. 1 (January 1959): 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Prince Vitovt was Vasilii II's grandfather and the head of his regency council; until his death, in 1431, Vitovt prevented Iurii Dmitrievich from deposing the underage prince. See Martin, Medieval Russia, 265-66.

38. DDG, 60; PSRL, 8:9

40. Alef, “Political Significance of the Inscriptions on Muscovite Coinage,” 5.

41. See, e.g., Majeska, , “The Moscow Coronation of 1498“; and Martin, Medieval Russia, 272-74Google Scholar, for descriptions of anticipatory succession ceremonies in relation to evolving succession principles. Anticipatory succession has been practiced in other situations where succession principles were unclear, notably Capetian France and seventh-century Byzantium. See Andrew Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 37-42; and David Michael Olster, The Politics of Usurpation in the Seventh Century: Rhetoric and Revolution in Byzantium (Amsterdam, 1993), 180-81.

42. Oreshnikov, Russkie monety, coins nos. 707-12.

43. Ibid., coins nos. 717-18.

44. Ibid., coins nos. 719-21. The side attributed to Dmitrii Iur'evich features a rider piercing the head of a dragon with a spear with a circular inscription; the side attributed to Vasilii II has only four lines of text spelling out the grand prince's name and rank.

45. See Alef, , “Political Significance of the Inscriptions on Muscovite Coinage,” 12; and Spasskii, Russian Monetary System, 143.Google Scholar

46. Lur'e, la. S., “Dvuimennye monety Vasiliia II i Shemiaki i dvoevlastie v Moskve,” in Likhachev, D. S., ed., Srednevekovaia Rus’ (Moscow, 1976), 87.Google Scholar

47. DDG, 63, 462.

48. Late in his reign, Vasilii II himself replaced the numismatic formula “Sovereign of All Rus'” with the pluralized “Sovereigns of All Rus'” to reflect his eldest son Ivan's co-option, attested to by a 1448 treaty in which Vasilii explicitly refers to Ivan as grand prince. Oreshnikov, Russkie monety, coins nos. 615, 617, 632, 634; DDG, 155. Like his father's 1425 coins ambiguously attributed to “Vasilii” and issued by the members of the regency council, these pieces aimed to forestall any doubt as to the legitimate heir. See Alef, “Political Significance of the Inscriptions on Muscovite Coinage,” 11.

49. Mel'nikova, A. S., “Sobytiia 1598 goda i monety Borisa Godunova,” Istoricheskie zapiski Akademii naukSSSR 109 (1983): 344-45Google Scholar; Mel'nikova, , Russkie monety, 65-67 Google Scholar. False Dmitrii I resumed types in the old Daniilovich style—consistent with his claim to restore the Daniilovich line; see Mel'nikova, , Russkie monety, 90 Google Scholar.

50. On numismatic documents of Ivan Ill's co-option of his son, see Spasski, I. G., “Gold Coins and Coin-like Gold in the Muscovite State, and the First Gold Pieces of Ivan III,” Numismatic Chronicle 17, no. 139 (1979), 165-84.Google Scholar In the event, Ivan the Younger predeceased his father. Although verbal expressions of father-son identity occur only on Muscovite coins, there is a possible pictorial parallel on nameless Riazan’ coins that place two human heads inside the family mark, or tagma, of the princely house. Chernetsov suggests that these faces “represent the ruling prince and his heir.” Chernetsov, types on Russian Coins, 156. His interpretation might be correlated with chronicle passages speaking of “the princes of Pronsk,” a princely city of Riazan', in the plural, and with 1371 and 1402 treaties (the same time frame as the aforementioned Riazan’ coins) referring to “the two princes of Pronsk (Vladimir and his son Ivan) as ‘grand princes.’ These documents were edited and copied in Moscow, so that the ascription must have had some special significance not fully defined in our records.” Presniakov, , Formation of the Great Russian State, 205.Google Scholar

51. Spasskii, , Russian Monetary System, 92.Google Scholar

52. “The abolition of appanage coinage parallels the curtailment of appanage political power,” writes Thomas Noonan, in “Forging a National Identity” (496).

53. Kollmann, , Kinship and Politics, 156.Google Scholar

54. Oreshnikov, Russkie monety, coin no. 749.

55. Vasilii laroslavich swears in the event of Vasilii II's death “to hold your son, Grand Prince Ivan, in your place.” DDG, 184.

56. Mel'nikova, A. S., Russkie monety ot Ivana Groznogo do Petra Pervogo: Istoriia russkoi denezhnoi sistemy c 1533 do 1682 (Moscow, 1989), 63.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., 134-39.

58. Ibid., 100.

59. Perrie, Maureen, ‘“Royal Marks': Reading the Bodies of Russian Pretenders, 17th- 19th Centuries,” Kritika 11, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 552.Google Scholar

60. Ibid., 558.

61. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 86-87 Google Scholar; Perrie, ‘“Royal Marks,'” 544-45; and Spasskii, , Russian Monetary System, 126-31Google Scholar. One witness attested to an additional moon and star; these are Ottoman rather than Russian symbols, and indeed the account comes from a Cossack border region. Other sources mention only the Russian emblems, while one cynic observes simply that the pretender had “something like a scab” on his shoulder. Compare the 1646 case in which a pretender paid a woman in the Crimean khanate, an Ottoman dependency, to brand a star and crescent moon onto his back and then “showed that mark to many people and spoke as if he was the son of the tsar and as if the state of Muscovy belonged to him; and the Russian people, believing his thievery, came to him.” The brand reproduces not a symbol of the Russian empire per se but the symbol of the local power. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 67 Google Scholar.

62. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 126-27Google Scholar; “1 rubl’ 1722 goda (s monogrammoi, na grudi net pal'movoi vetvi (na grudi ordenskaia lenta),” Gdge Nashel, at http://gdenashel.ru/katalogrus/1811-l-rubl-1722-goda-s-monogrammoi-na.html (last accessed November 5,2015); and Spasskii, Russian Monetary System, 155.

63. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 127 Google Scholar; “1 rubl’ 1724 goda ('Solnechnik.’ Portret v latakh, SPB v obreze rukava,” Gde Nashel, at http://gdenashel.ru/katalogrus/1821-l-rubl-1724-godasolnechnik-v-latax.html (last accessed November 5, 2015).

64. Chistov, Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 144; Perrie, 546-47, 549; “10 rublei 1775 goda,” Gde Nashel, at gdenashel.ru/katalogrus/3577-10-rublei-1775- -goda.html (last accessed November 5, 2015); and “Ruble—Ekaterina II,” Numista, at http://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces26972.html (last accessed November 5,2015).

65. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 147-48Google Scholar; Perrie, ‘“Royal Marks,'” 548.

66. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 185 Google Scholar; Perrie, “'Royal Marks,'” 550; and “1 rubl’ 1797 goda,” Gde Nashel, at http://gdenashel.ru/katalogrus/1973-1-rubl-1797-goda.html (last accessed November 5,2015).

67. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 210, 44Google Scholar; Perrie, ‘“Royal Marks,'” 550-51, 556-57. In the mid-nineteenth century, we further encounter a crossshaped pattern of hair on the chest of a false Grand Duke Konstantin and folk songs that attribute a similar mark to False Dmitrii I. While the eagle on contemporary rubles continued to bear four crosses, it seems more likely that the cross had at this point become a conventional sign of royalty, as in French legends of foundling kings, and was, as Perrie suggests, influenced by the crosses traced on the body during baptism and royal unction rites. Perrie, “'Royal Marks,'” 549. Other pretenders’ marks are either unspecified or appear in foreign sources. Dutch traveler Isaac Massa attests to contemporary Russian rumors that the body exhibited as False Dmitrii I lacked an unspecified sign on the left side of his chest that had distinguished the ruler. Massa, Isaak, Kratkoe izvestie o Moskovii v nachale XVII v., trans. Morozova, A. A. (Moscow, 1937), 157, 159Google Scholar. A Polish source ascribes an eagle to the arm of False Dmitrii I, and a Belarusian chronicle cites unspecified marks shown by False Dmitrii II at a border crossing. Other early accounts of royal marks are clustered in 1643-46 and also appear abroad: an unspecified heraldic sign in Poland; a half-moon and star tattoo in Crimea; crosses and stars and the inscription “Semen Shuiskii Vasil'evich, son of Grand Prince and Tsar of Muscovy Vasiliii Ivanovich” in Moldova; an eagle with Russian writing around it in Poland; and Timofei Ankudinov's unspecified mark in Constantinople, which Chistov takes as a gerb and which Perrie suggests was astronomical. See Perrie, ‘“Royal Marks,'” 540-44; and Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 71 Google Scholar. Some of these marks are reminiscent of numismatic phenomena. For example, the eagle appeared on all major Polish coins of the time and a bird also appeared on the Russian polushka. The Polish instance of an eagle surrounded by writing is, as Perrie notes, especially reminiscent of a medal, seal, or coin. Perrie, ‘“Royal Marks,'” 554. However, none of these can be correlated with Russian coinage specifically, which throughout the period featured a horseman on the kopeck and a bird on the polushka.

68. The distribution of small crosses on the bodies of pretenders in 1765,1772, and 1774—on the head, arms, and foot—seems to echo the distribution of crosses on the gerb depicted on contemporary rubles: a large cross on the main crown, two smaller crosses below and to the sides of it (on each of the two eagle heads), and a prominent cross on the orb held in the eagle's left foot. In periods when a cross occupied the entire obverse or reverse of the ruble, crosses appear correspondingly on the chest or back of the pretender.

69. Quoted in Uspenskii, “Tsar and Pretender,” 265.

70. Chernetsov, , Types on Russian Coins, 64-65.Google Scholar

71. PSRL, 26:323; Spassky, , Russian Monetary System, 98.Google Scholar

72. Spasskii, , Russian Monetary System, 98.Google Scholar

73. Strohm, Paul, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (New Haven, 1998), 139.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original.

74. The other instances are a prince-executioner coin of Dmitrii Donskoi and coins with a verbal warning (rostozha [storozha] na bezumnago cheloveka) minted by Ivan Mikhailovich of Tver’ during a period of rivalry in that principality. Oreshnikov, , Russkie monety, coins nos. 453, 97-100.Google Scholar

75. Deng, , Coinage and State Formation, 145.Google Scholar

76. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 216.Google Scholar See also Perrie, ‘“Royal Marks,'” 550.

77. Chistov, , Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy, 30-31.Google Scholar

78. Longworth, , “The Pretender Phenomenon in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” 63.Google Scholar