The life of St Germogen of Moscow
He wrote to the traitors among his own people, reminding them of their faith and their country, and when the false claimant was finally killed by his own men the danger to Moscow did not end, since Poles and their Russian collaborators still held the city.
He sent letters out to every town he could reach, calling the nation to rise and free the capital and choose a lawful tsar of its own. Moscow did rise. The Poles, driven back, burned the city and shut themselves inside the Kremlin, and in the chaos they seized the patriarch along with the countrymen who had sided with them and locked him away in a monastery there. Even from that cell he sent out one more letter, blessing the army that had come to free the city. He was kept there more than nine months without enough to eat, and in February of the year sixteen twelve he died of that hunger. His own people buried him at the monastery where he died, and long afterward moved him to rest in the cathedral at Moscow.
