Vassili Chouiski , military Russian, wire of Vassili Chouiski, was illustrated by its courage and its exploits.

The king of Poland, Battori, having declared the war with the tsar in 1581, and Zamoyski, at the head of the Polish army, having taken the fortified towns of the border, Vassili Zouiski was put at the head of the left wing of the Russian army, with order to push back the Tartar, if, as it was feared, they supported the movements of the Polish army. Vassili, to fill its instructions, discussed the Oka. It appears that the barbarians were held in their deserts.

Zamoyski, which ordered nearly one hundred thousand men, advancing on Pleskow, the tsar charged Zouiski with defending this important place, which covered the capital of the empire. The August 25th 1582, it was encircled, and on September 1st the trench was open; the third day the Poles went up to the attack, Battori and Zamoyski excited them by their presence, and already the Polish standards floated on two lathes of the city. The Russians fled in disorder. Zouiski, casualty, covered with blood, stop them in their showing the image of the Virgin and the relics of the saints whom the clergy carried in procession. In the same moment it makes put fire at the mines, and one of the turns, which the Pole had seized, change in Par: do not give up the relics of the saints who protect you exclaims Zouiski.

At once courage reappears, the Poles are driven out second tower and part of the ramparts where they had been established. The combat lasted all the Zouiski day returned in triumph, leading in front of him the guns, the prisoners, the flags and the other trophies of its victory. A few days later, having made an exit, it fell into a ambush, and lost four hundred men. It was not long in being compensated for this failure by new exploits, and it forced finally the Poles to move away. It was whereas those, to be avenged for this affront, had recourse to an infamous means. One their artillerists, named Ostromène, prepared an iron trunk in which it placed twelve so thin guns of arquebus, that the least effort could break them. To the lid of this trunk were attached, cords which answered these guns, so that it was impossible to open it without making them leave, and without putting in parts all that was in front of them. One carried this trunk in Zouiski on behalf of a Polish officer who, pretending to desert, wanted to put in safety all that it had deposited there out of gold and invaluable stones. The trick succeeds partly; March, like the Russian general was absent, one of its lieutenants hastened to open the fatal box, and was killed at the moment even, as several officers who were present. Part of the roof of the house was reversed by the explosion.

Zourski, made indignant, published an extremely sharp writing against Zamoyski, which he showed of this perfidious stratagem; and it called it in duel; but the business did not have other continuations. The January 4th 1582, Vassili still made an exit that it called since its good-byes with the Poles; it had been the forty-sixth for four months and half. Lastly, the 6 of the same month, one signed a ten years truce.

The January 17th, the treaty having been ratified by Zamoyski, this general invited the senior officers of the town of Pleskow than a feast than it had made them prepare in the Zouiski camp sent to it, but it refused to leave the place which it had defended with such an amount of courage. In 1584, the tsar Fédor Ier, who had succeeded his father Ivan the Terrible, gave to Zouiski the incomes of the town of Pleskow, but the power of the Zouiski made shade with Boris Godounow, which, under the Fédor tsar, had seized the authority; these princes were exiled; and Vassili, their chief, obtained with sorrow the permission to remain with Moscow. This disgrace was not enough with the wild favorite; that which the Russia honoured as its liberator was thrown in a dungeon and was strangled, and one allowed only with sorrow to deposit his remainders in a vault of the convent of Saint-Cyrille.

See too

• Chouiski

Source