nanshe-of-nina: WOMEN’S HISTORY ☦ ELENA VASILYEVNA GLINSKAYA (c. 1508/10 – 4 April 1538)
nanshe-of-nina:WOMEN’S HISTORY ☦ ELENA VASILYEVNA GLINSKAYA (c. 1508/10 – 4 April 1538)Elena Vasilyevna Glinskaya was a daughter of Vasili Lvovich Glinsky and Ana Jakšić. Her father was a Lipka Tatar prince who claimed descent from the Mongol military commander, Mamai, and her mother was a Serbian princess. Her uncle, Mikhail LvovichGlinsky, was a close friend of Vasili III, Grand Prince of Russia, who had fled from Lithuania after leading a failed rebellion against Zygmunt I. On the advice of Mikhail, Vasili, who was in mid-forties, sought to divorce his barren first wife, Solomonia Saburova, and remarry to Elena so that he could sire heirs. Though the Russian Orthodox Church was opposed to the divorce, Vasili achieved his goal regardless and married Elena. On 25 August 1530, Elena gave birth to her first son, Ivan, followed by another son, Yuri, in 1532. Later legends claimed that Elena had used Sami shamans and Finnish witches to help her conceive, probably due to her eldest son’s later notoriety. Vasili died in 1533 of a leg abscess and on his deathbed, made Elena regent for young Ivan. Elena was then immediately challenged for the regency by her late husband’s brothers, Yury, Prince of Dmitrov and Andrei, Prince of Staritza. During her regency, she signed a peace treaty with her uncle’s former enemy, Zygmunt and reformed the currency. However, Elena came to conflict with her uncle Mikhail over the regency and she accused of poisoning her late husband and had him arrested in August 1534 where he died a month later. Elena herself died suddenly 4 April 1538. Her sons’ nurse, Agrippina Feodorovna Chelyadnina, was arrested and accused of poisoning Elena, though modern historians are inclined to think that she was actually killed at the behest of the Shuysky cousins, Ivan Vasilievich and Andrei Mikhailovich, who took over the regency after Elena’s death. Elena’s eldest son, Ivan, later became known as Ivan the Terrible and developed an extreme dislike of his boyars, which culminated in him forming the Oprichnina in 1565 to suppress them. -- source link
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