credit and his court; Vatatzes, the favourite instrument of
her attempts at reform, was assassinated by the emperor's
orders. Eastward the Empire was overrun by the Turks;
from the north Bulgarians and Vlachs descended unchecked
to ravage the plains of Macedonia and Thrace; while Alexius
squandered the public treasure on his palaces and gardens.
Soon he was threatened by a new and yet more formidable
danger. In 1202 the Western princes assembled at Venice,
bent on a new crusade. To them Alexius, son of the deposed
Isaac, made appeal, promising as a crowning bribe to heal the
schism of East and West if they would help him to depose his
uncle. The crusaders, whose objective had been Egypt, were
persuaded to set their course for Constantinople, before which
they appeared in June 1203, proclaiming the emperor Alexius
IV. and summoning the capital to depose his uncle. Alexius
III., sunk in debauchery, took no efficient measures to
resist. His son-in-law, Lascaris, who was the only one
to do anything, was defeated at Scutari, and the siege of
Constantinople began. On the 17th of July the crusaders,
the aged doge Dandolo at their head, scaled the walls and
took the city by storm. During the fighting and carnage
that followed Alexius hid in the palace, and finally, with
one of his daughters, Irene, and such treasures as he could
collect, got into a boat and escaped to Develton in Thrace,
leaving his wife, his other daughters and his Empire to the
victors. Isaac, drawn from his prison and robed once
more in the imperial purple, received hs son in state.
Shortly afterwards Alexius made an effort in conjunction
with Murtzuphlos (Alexius V.) to recover the throne. The
attempt was unsuccessful and, after wandering about Greece,
he surrendered with Euphrosyne, who had meanwhile joined
him, to Boniface of Montferrat, then master of a great part
of the Balkan peninsula. Leaving his protection he sought
shelter with Michael, despot of Epirus, and then repaired
to Asia Minor,where his son-in-law Lascaris was holding his
own against the Latins. Alexius, joined by the sultan of
Iconium (Konieh), now demanded the crown of Lascaris, and
on his refusal marched against him. Lascaris, however,
defeated and took him prisoner. Alexius was relegated to
a monastery at Nicaea, where he died on some date unknown.
AUTHORITIES.--Nicetas Acominatus, George Acropolites, Nicephorus Gregoras;
and the sources for the Fourth Crusade (see CRUSADES). (J. B. B.)
ALEXIUS V., eastern Roman emperor, was proclaimed emperor on
the 5th of February 1204, during the siege of Constantinople
by the Latins (Fourth Crusade). His name was Alexius Ducas
Murtzuphlos, and he was a connexion of the imperial house
of the Angell. His elevation was the result of a revolution
in the city against Isaac II. and Alexius IV. He conducted
the defence with great bravery till it became hopeless
(April 12), whereupon he fled. He would then have made
common cause with Alexius III. against the Latins, but was
blinded by that ex-monarch and fell into the hands of the
crusaders, who put him to death by casting him from the top
of the Pillar of Theodosius as the murderer of Alexius IV.
ALEXIUS MIKHAILOVICH (1624-1676), tsar of Muscovy, the son
of Tsar Michael Romanov and Eudoxia Stryeshnevaya, was born
on the 9th of March 1629. A youth at his father's death
(1645), he was committed to the care of the boyarin Boris
Ivanovich Morozov, a shrewd and sensible guardian, sufficiently
enlightened to recognize the needs of his country, and by no
means inaccessible to Western ideas. Morozov's foreign policy was
pacificatory. He secured the truce with Poland and carefully
avoided complications with the Porte. His domestic policy was
severely equitable, and aimed at relieving the public burdens
by limiting the privileges of foreign traders and abolishing
a great many useless and expensive court offices. On the 17th
of January 1648 he procured the marriage of the tsar with Maria
Miloslavshaya, himself marrying her sister, Anna, ten days
later. The Miloslavskis were typical self-seeking 17th century
boyars, whose extortions made them generally detested. In
May 1648 the people of Moscow rose against them, and the
young tsar was compelled to dismiss both them and their patron
Morozov. The successful issue of the Moscow riots was the
occasion of disquieting disturbances all over the tsardom
culminating in dangerous rebellions at Pskov and Great Novgorod,
with which the government was so unable to cope that they
surrendered, practically granting the malcontents their own
terms. One man only had displayed equal tact and courage at Great
Novgorod, the metropolitan Nikon (q.v.), who in consequence
became in 1651 the tsar's chief minister. In 1653 the weakness
and disorder of Poland, which had just emerged, bleeding at
every pore, from the savage Cossack war, encouraged Alexius
to attempt to recover from her secular rival the old Russian
lands. On the 1st of October 1653 a national assembly met
at Moscow to sanction the war and find the means of carrying
it on, and in April 1654 the army was blessed by Nikon (now
patriarch). The campaign of 1654 was an uninterrupted triumph,
and scores of towns, including the important fortress of
Smolensk, fell into the hands of the Muscovites. In January
1655 the rout of Ochmatov arrested their progress; but in
the summer of the same year, the sudden invasion by Charles
X. of Sweden for the moment swept the Polish state out of
existence; the Muscovites, unopposed, quickly appropriated
nearly everything which was not already occupied by the
Swedes, and when at last the Poles offered to negotiate, the
whole grand-duchy of Lithuania was the least of the demands of
Alexius. Fortunately for Poland, the tsar and the king of
Sweden now quarrelled over the apportionment of the spoil, and
at the end of May 1656 Alexius, stimulated by the emperor and
the other enemies of Sweden, declared war against her. Great
things were expected of the Swedish war, but nothing came of
it. Dorpat was taken, but countless multitudes were lost
in vain before Riga. In the meantime Poland had so far
recovered herself as to become a much more dangerous foe
than Sweden, and, as it was impossible to wage war with both
simultaneously, the tsar resolved to rid himself of the Swedes
first. This he did by the peace of Kardis (July 2, 1661),
whereby Muscovy retroceded all her conquests. The Polish war
dragged on for six years longer and was then concluded by a
truce, nominally for thirteen years, which proved the most
durable of treaties. By the truce of Andrussowo (February
11, 1667) Vitebsk, Polotsk and Polish Livonia were restored
to Poland, but the infinitely more important Smolensk and
Kiev remained in the hands of the Muscovite together with
the whole eastern bank of the Dnieper. This truce was the
achievement of Athanasy Orduin-Nashchokin, the first Russian
chancellor and diplomatist in the modern sense, who after
the disgrace of Nikon became the tsar's first minister till
1670, when he was superseded by the equally able Artamon
Matvyeev, whose beneficent influence prevailed to the end
of the reign. It is the crowning merit of the ever amiable
and courteous tsar Alexius that he discovered so many great
men (like Nikon, Orduin, Matvyeev, the best of Peter's
precursors) and suitably employed them. He was not a man
of superior strength of character, or he would never have
submitted to the dictation of Nikon. But, on the other
hand, he was naturally, if timorously, progressive, or he
would never have encouraged the great reforming boyarin
Matvyeev. His education was necessarily narrow; yet he
was learned in his way, wrote verses, and even began a
history of his own times. His last years, notwithstanding
the terrible rebellion of Stenka Razin, were deservedly
tranquil. By his first consort he had thirteen children,
of whom two sickly sons and eight healthy daughters survived
him. By his second consort, Natalia Naruishkina, he had two
children, the tsarevich Peter and the tsarevna Natalia.
See Robert Nisbet Bain, The First Romanovs (London, 1905). (R. N. B.)
ALEXIUS PETROVICH (1600-1718), Russian tsarevich, the sole
surviving son of Peter I. and Eudoxia Lopukhina, was horn on the
19th of February 1690. The young tsar married the boyarinya
Lopukhina at his mother's command. We know nothing of the
bride except that she was beautiful, modest and ``brought up
in the fear of the Lord.'' She would, doubtless, have made a
model tsaritsa of the pre-Petrine period, but, unfortunately,
she was no fit wife for such a vagabond of genius as Peter the
Great. From the first her society bored Peter unspeakably,
and, after the birth of their second short-lived son
Alexander, on the 3rd of October 1691, he practically deserted
her. The young Alexius was ignored by his father till he was
nine years old. Peter was a rare and unwelcome guest in his
own family, and a son who loved his mother could have little
affection for a father who had ever been that mother's worst
persecutor. From his sixth to his ninth year Alexius was
educated by the diffuse and pedantic Vyazemsky, but after the
removal of his mother to the Suzdal Prokovsky Monastery he
was confided to the care of learned foreigners, who taught him
history, geography, mathematics and French. In 1703 Alexius
was ordered to follow the army to the field as a private in a
bombardier regiment. In 1704 he was present at the capture of
Narva. At this period the preceptors of the tsarevich had
the highest opinion of his ability; but, unfortunately, it
was not the sort of ability that his father could make use
of. He was essentially a student, with strong leanings towards
archaeology and ecclesiology. A monastic library was the proper
place for this gentle emotional dreamer, who clung so fondly
to the ancient traditions. To a prince of his temperament the
vehement activity of his abnormally energetic father was very
offensive. He liked neither the labour itself nor its
object. Yet Peter, not unnaturally, wished his heir to
dedicate himself to the service of new Russia, and demanded
from him unceasing labour in order to maintain the brand-new
state at the high level of greatness to which it had been
raised. Painful relations between father and son, quite
apart from the personal antipathies already existing, were
therefore inevitable. It was an additional misfortune
for Alexius that his father should have been too busy to
attend to him just as he was growing up from boyhood to
manhood. He was left in the hands of reactionary boyars
and priests, who encouraged him to hate his father and
wish for the death of the tsar-antichrist. His confessor,
Yakov Ignatiev, whom he promised to obey as ``an angel and
apostle of God,'' was his chief counsellor in these days.
In 1708 Peter sent Alexius to Smolensk to collect provender
and recruits, and thence to Moscow to fortify it against
Charles XII. At the end of 1709 he went to Dresden for twelve
months for finishing lessons in French and German, mathematics
and fortification, and, his education completed, he was
married, greatly against his will, to the princess Charlotte
of Brunswick- Wolfenbuttel, whose sister espoused, almost
simultaneously, the heir to the Austrian throne, the archduke
Charles. The wedding was celebrated at Torgau on the 14th of
October 1711, in the house of the queen of Poland, and three
weeks later the bridegroom was hurried away by his father to
Thorn to superintend the provisioning of the Russian troops in
