as his sovereign after the Romanovs had sorted out their confusion over the succession. Miloradovich had sufficient evidence of the mounting Decembrist revolt, but did not take any action until the rebels took over the Senate Square on . He rode into the rows of rebel troops and tried to talk them into obedience, but was fatally shot by Pyotr Kakhovsky and stabbed by Yevgeny Obolensky. Early years Mikhail Miloradovich was the son of Major General Andrei Miloradovich (1726–1798). The Miloradovichs descended from an Eastern Orthodox Bosnian Vlach noble family and a katun clan from Hum, in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina who rose to a station of prominent Bosnian Ottoman nobility of Sanjak of Herzegovina.. The Russian branch of the Miloradovich family was established in 1715, when Mikhail I Miloradovich (the first) (), one of three brothers recruited by Peter I to incite rebellion against the Turks four years earlier, fled from Herzegovina to Russia and joined Peter's service as a colonel. He was a commander of the Hadiach Regiment. Towards the end of Peter's reign he was imprisoned in connection with Pavlo Polubotok's treason case, but was spared from further misfortune by Peter's death. His grandson Andrey served thirty years in the Russian Army and later moved into civil administration as the Governor of Little Russia and the Chernigov governorate. The family owned lands in the Poltava Governorate; Mikhail inherited up to fifteen hundred serfs. Mikhail's father "enrolled" him in the military in his infancy, and later sent teenage Mikhail to study military sciences in the universities of Königsberg and Göttingen, and in Strasbourg and Metz. According to Nikolai Leskov, the education was superficial: Leskov described Mikhail as a boy of "charming ignorance" who did not even master the French language properly, and said that his French was littered with the "most grave and curious mistakes" (an anecdote credited him with blending pittoresque and synagogue into "pittagogue"). Sixteen-year-old Mikhail returned to Russia in 1787, joined the army as a praporshchik (a junior commissioned officer rank) in the Izmaylovsky Regiment and was soon sent into action in the Russo-Swedish War of 1788–1790. Military career Italian and Swiss campaigns Miloradovich did not earn any distinction in the war of 1788–1790, but he advanced rapidly in peacetime. A captain of the Guards in 1796, Paul I regarded him favorably and he was promoted to the rank of colonel in 1797 and major