by heart. He connected himself to King David by relation to the emperors of Byzantium. Prince Mikhail Glinsky was the de facto ruler of Russia after Vasily died until Princess Elena got tired of him. She falsely accused him of wanting to rule despotically and had him put in prison from August 5, 1534 until his death in September 15, 1536. Elena then had Vasily's brother, Prince Andrey, sent to jail in 1537 after he conspired to overthrow her son. He died six months later, and Elena had the 30 nobles who had assisted Andrey hung from the gibbets along the roads of Moscow to send a message to those who tried to rebel against her son. Elena's lover, Ivan Obolansky, was now ruling for her and her young son. Elena died suddenly on April 3, 1538, and immediately Vasily Shuisky took over and sent Obolansky to jail and his sister Agrafenn, who was then Ivan's nurse, to a nunnery. Shuisky was the first of a list of regents that came along, each one being removed from their position by trickery or a twisted coup d'etat. Ivan had been exposed to violence is whole life and this warped him. He learned that the way to deal with the boyars was to use trickery and violence. When Ivan was 13, he had the Regent Andrey Shursky arrested and turned over to the keeper of the hounds, where he was clubbed to death and his body thrown into the snow. Ivan had already proven to be a sick person, sometimes venting his anger by throwing dogs from the terrace of the Kremlin Palace to the ground. By 14 years old, Ivan was riding through the squares and marketplaces with his friends, robbing merchants and flailing everyone he could reach with his whip. In 1545, when Ivan was 15, he became angry at a boyar named Afanasy Buturlin because he said "some rude words." Ivan wanted his punishment to fit the crime, so he had a stage erected in front of the prison and had Buturlin's tongue publicly cut out. Ivan felt bad about this later and invited Buturlin to ...
