usual practice was that she would convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Rumors circulated that Dmitry had obtained the support of Polish King Sigismund and Pope Paul V by promising to reunite the Russian Orthodox Church and the Holy See; so, claimed the rumors, Tsarina Marina did not convert to the Orthodox faith. This angered the Russian Orthodox Church, the boyars, and the population alike. The resentful Prince Vasily Shuisky, head of the boyars, began to plot against the tsar, accusing him of spreading Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and sodomy. This gained traction and popular support, especially since Dmitry surrounded himself with foreigners who flouted Russian customs. According to Russian chronicler Avraamy Palitsyn, Dmitry further enraged many Muscovites by permitting his Catholic and Protestant soldiers, whom the Russian Church regarded as heretics, to pray in Orthodox churches. Shuisky's adherents had spread word that Tsar Dmitry was about to order his Polish retainers to lock the city gates and massacre the people of Moscow. Whether such orders existed or not, Palitsyn's chronicle reported them as undeniable fact. Death On the morning of 17 May 1606, ten days after Dmitry's marriage to Marina, huge numbers of boyars and commoners stormed the Kremlin. Dmitry tried to flee by jumping out a window, but fractured his leg in the fall. He fled to a bathhouse and tried to disappear within. But he was recognized and dragged out by the boyars, who killed him lest he successfully appeal to the crowd. His body was hacked to pieces, burned, and then the ashes fired from a cannon towards Poland. According to Palitsyn, Dmitry's death set off a massacre of his supporters. He boasted in his chronicle that "a great amount of heretical blood was spilled on the streets of Moscow." Dmitry's reign had lasted only eleven months before Prince Shuisky took his place. Two further impostors later appeared, False Dmitry II and False Dmitry III, the first of whom was publicly "accepted" by Tsarina Marina as her fallen husband. Portrayals in literature False Dmitry is one of the primary characters in Alexander Pushkin's blank verse drama Boris Godunov. Pushkin's character is a young novice monk who impersonates the Tsarevich after he learns he is the age the child would have been had he lived. Pushkin's decision to humanise the False Dmitry earned him the disapproval of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, who prevented the play from being published