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    "headline": "Montenegro’s only tsar was an impostor who let his people believe he was Russia’s dead Peter III",
    "description": "Šćepan Mali surfaced in 1766 with no known past. Exposed by a Russian envoy in 1769, he was pardoned, handed a Russian officer's uniform and sent back to rule.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-08T22:43:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Catherine the Great, impostors, Montenegro, Šćepan Mali",
    "articleBody": "Montenegro has had exactly one tsar, and nobody knows who he was. Šćepan Mali, meaning Stephen the Little, ran the mountain country as an absolute monarch from 1768 to 1773 on the strength of a rumor that he was Peter III of Russia, who had died in 1762. He never actually said so. That was the trick. He appears in the record in the autumn of 1766 as a physician in the village of Maine, then in Venetian territory. Locals began whispering that the healer was the exiled emperor. In church, at prayers for the Russian imperial family, he was said to weep and turn to the wall. He cried at a portrait of Peter. Asked directly, he neither confirmed nor denied, and he signed his documents with a flourish of mock humility: “Šćepan Mali, the smallest on Earth, and good unto the good.” A dead man’s job The timing suited him. Prince-Bishop Sava, Montenegro’s nominal ruler, was widely dismissed as idle, and the clans were busy feuding. On November 2, 1767, the Montenegrins issued a charter recognizing Šćepan as Peter. The Russian ambassador in Constantinople wrote to Sava that the emperor was dead and buried and that this was an “impostor and vagabond.” Sava tried to pass on the news. He was stripped of his property and shut up in his own monastery. Foreign powers tried to remove the newcomer and failed. Venice attempted to poison him in 1767. In 1768, the Ottomans sent a reported 50,000 soldiers. Perhaps 10,000 Montenegrins met them, won an opening battle, and then watched heavy rain soak the invaders’ gunpowder. Caught, chained and rehired Catherine the Great, Peter’s widow and successor, finally got an envoy through in August 1769. Prince Yuri Dolgorukov spent eight hours with Šćepan and came away with what one of his party called “obscure and giddy conversation.” At a mass meeting outside Cetinje, the Russians denounced the fraud, and the crowd swore loyalty to Catherine. The next morning Šćepan rode up with his guards and the crowd cheered him anyway. Dolgorukov’s own men had to seize him. Under threat of torture he claimed to be from Ioannina in Greece, a poor choice for a man who spoke no Greek, and then a Dalmatian named Rajčević, which nobody could confirm. With the impostor in chains, the clans went straight back to raiding each other. Dolgorukov, with a price on his head and his powder magazine blown up, decided to leave. Before he did, he pardoned Šćepan, made him a Russian officer, gave him the uniform and confirmed him as ruler. Then the prisoner guided his captor down the cliffs to the sea at night. “I would truly have fallen into the abyss had not Šćepan Mali, who was accustomed to such places, virtually carried me in his arms,” Dolgorukov recalled. The fake outlasted the original The comparison is hard to resist. The real Peter III reigned from January 5 to July 9, 1762, which comes to 185 days. His impersonator held power from February 1768 to September 1773, roughly 2,050 days, more than ten times as long. He used the time. He called assemblies 25 times, ordered Montenegro’s first census in 1771, created a Court of Twelve drawn from clan leaders, and introduced the death penalty, with 90 recorded sentences for vendettas and another 90 for pillaging. A land mine he was demonstrating in 1771 left him disabled and blind in one eye, and he governed afterward from a sedan chair. On September 22, 1773, monks at Donji Brčeli Monastery found him dead in his bedroom, killed by a servant bribed by an Ottoman governor, Kara Mahmud Pasha. His real name remains unproven, though one recent theory identifies him as Jovan Stefanović Baljević, a Montenegrin doctoral graduate who once forged passports. In 1955 his story became Lažni car, “The Fake Tsar,” the first Montenegrin feature film. Further reading Wikipedia: Šćepan Mali Image: Andrija12345678, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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