Muscovy’s long march to supremacy among the early Russian polities reached a decisive turn on 14 July 1471 when it defeated longtime rival Novgorod at the Battle of Shelon.
Ten days after that defeat, Novgorod’s commander Dmitry Isakevich Boretsky was put to death by the will of Ivan III.
Novgorod the Great had been losing ground to its neighbor for generations. Matters came in the end to the “Mayoress” Marfa Boretskaya, the widow of Novgorod’s former mayor (posadnik) Isaac Boretsky; she emerged in the 1460s as the charismatic leader of the hardline anti-Muscovite types.
Struggling to find a political foothold upon which to resist burgeoning Moscow, Marfa Boretskaya intrigued with the friendly — and similarly Muscophobic — Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This drew Ivan III into what would prove to be the decisive military showdown between these venerable cities.
Marfa’s son Dmitry, our date’s unfortunate executed, would have stood to garner the glory of it had he prevailed.
He didn’t.
Marfa Boretskaya was not put to death herself, but taken prisoner to Moscow upon Novgorod’s formal annexation in 1478 and socked away in a convent.
On this day..
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- 1833: Anastasio Aquino, Nonualco rebel
- 1951: Arno Esch, liberal
- 2010: Michel Germaneau, AQIM hostage
- 1653: Six beheaded and one hanged for the Swiss Peasant War
- 1722: Marie-Jeanne Roger, "la Grande-Jeanneton"
- 2008: Christopher Scott Emmett, jocund
- 1735: Patience Boston, converted
- 1588: Nicholas Garlick, Robert Ludlam, and Richard Simpson
- 1892: Ruggles brothers lynched
- 1942: Joan Peiro i Belis, Catalan anarchist
- 1794: Not Thomas Paine