As soon as Feodor expired, and it was announced that Peter was appointed successor to the throne, to the exclusion of his elder brother Ivan, Sophia, through her emissaries, excited the militia of the capital to one of the most bloody revolts Moscow had ever witnessed.  It was her intention to gain the throne for the imbecile Ivan, as she doubted not that she could, in that event, govern the empire at her pleasure.  Peter, child as he was, had already developed a character of self-reliance which taught Sophia that he would speedily wrest the scepter from her hands.

The second day after the burial of Feodor, the militia, or strelitzes as they were called, a body of citizen soldiers in Moscow, corresponding very much with the national guard of Paris, surrounded the Kremlin, in a great tumult, and commenced complaining of nine of their colonels, who owed them some arrears of pay.  They demanded that these officers should be surrendered to them, and their demand was so threatening that the court, intimidated, was compelled to yield.  The wretched officers were seized by the mob, tied to the ground naked, upon their faces, and whipped with most terrible severity.  The soldiers thus overawed opposition, and became a power which no one dared resist.  Sophia was their inspiring genius, inciting and directing them through her emissaries.  Though some have denied her complicity in these deeds of violence, still the prevailing voice of history is altogether against her.

Sophia, having the terrors of the mob to wield, as her executive power, convened an assembly of the princes of the blood, the generals, the lords, the patriarch and the bishops of the church, and even of the principal merchants.  She urged upon them that Ivan, by right of birth, was entitled to the empire.  The mother of Peter, Natalia Nariskin, now empress dowager, was still young and beautiful.  She had two brothers occupying posts of influence at court.  The family of the Nariskins had consequently much authority in the empire.  Sophia dreaded the power of her mother-in-law, and her first efforts of intrigue were directed against the Nariskins.  Her agents were everywhere busy, in the court and in the army, whispering insinuations against them.  It was even intimated that they had caused the death of Feodor, by bribing his physician to poison him, and that they had attempted the life of Ivan.  At length Sophia gave to her agents a list of forty lords whom they were to denounce to the insurgent soldiery as enemies to them and to the State.

This was the signal for their massacre.  Two were first seized in the palace of the Kremlin, and thrown out of the window.  The soldiers received them upon their pikes, and dragged their mutilated corpses through the streets to the great square of the city.  They then rushed back to the palace, where they found Athanasius Nariskin, one of the brothers of the queen dowager.  He was immediately murdered.  They