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Deadly Family Spats Through the Centuries

Khalid Elhassan January 4, 2021 33 min

Canterbury Cathedral - Archbishop of Canterbury — The death of Thomas Becket. Encyclopedia Britannica

17. Peter the Great Had His Own Son Flogged to Death

Nikolai Ge’s ‘Peter I Interrogates Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich at Peterhof’, 1871. Wikimedia

The embarrassment of his own son seeking asylum at a foreign court enraged Peter the Great, who sent agents to track down the Tsarevich Alexei. In 1717, Count Peter Tolstoi, the most unscrupulous and subtle of Peter’s agents (and ancestor of the famous nineteenth-century writer Peter Tolstoy) tracked Alexei to a castle in Naples. He handed the Tsarevich a letter in which Peter berated Alexei, but promised not to punish him if he returned to Russia. Ignoring warnings that it was a trick, the Tsarevich returned to Russia in 1718.

Upon his arrival, Alexei was made to beg his father’s forgiveness during a public spectacle in which he was disinherited. The Tsar forced him to name those who had aided his flight, which resulted in the torture and execution of dozens of Alexei’s associates. That done, Peter ordered his son jailed. On June 19^th, 1718, the Tsar had Alexei flogged for days, until he confessed to conspiring to murder his father. The flogging was so severe that Peter’s son died of his wounds within a week.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.