
Simeon Bekbulatovich
Simeon Bekbulatovich ( ; born
Sain-Bulat, ; died 5 January 1616) was a baptized
khan of the
Khanate of Qasim. During the
Oprichnina period, by a strange whim of
Ivan the Terrible, he was named the
Grand Prince and
Tsar
of the Whole Russia (1574–1576). He participated in
Livonian war as a commander of the
Qasim cavalry.
In 1574,
after executing a large number of boyars and
archimandrite of Chudov
Monastery
, Ivan IV
left Moscow
for his
palace in Alexandrov
. At that time he wished to be styled merely
"Ivan from Moscow" and had Simeon crowned the sovereign of Russia
instead of himself. Historians have a number of opinions as to why
Ivan did this.
After his
short and ephemeral "rule" in the Moscow Kremlin
, Simeon was married to Ivan's cousin and proclaimed
a kniaz of Tver
and Torzhok
. When
Boris Godunov was elected Tsar in
1598, he viewed the former puppet monarch with suspicion and sent
him away from the court.
False Dmitry I,
who had even more reasons to fear Simeon, banished him to the
Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery
as a monk.
Simeon
Bekbulatovich died in 1616, when the Romanov dynasty was firmly installed in the
Kremlin, and was buried in the Simonov Monastery
in Moscow
.
Russian genealogists debate whether he left any male issue by his
marriage to Ivan the Terrible's cousin. If he did, their progeny
would have been the only living descendants of
Ivan the Great and his wife
Sophia Paleologue and, as such, should
have been viewed as potential claimants to the Russian crown.