[5] Marina Mniszech's marriage to False Dmitriy I provided an opportunity for the Polish magnates to control their protégé.

In November he sent a diplomatic mission to Poland, asking for Marina's hand and proposing a military alliance to defeat the Ottoman Empire.

The first wedding ceremony, performed in November 1605 by the Bishop of Kraków, Cardinal Bernard Maciejowski was held per procura in Kraków, at the Montelupi complex (Pod Jaszczurami and Firlejowska) and was attended by the Polish king Sigismund III Vasa himself, as well as hundreds of high-ranking szlachta members and foreign guests.

On the morning of 17 May 1606, about two weeks after the coronation, conspirators opposed to Dmitri and his policy of close cooperation with Poland stormed the Kremlin.

After the death of False Dmitry I, Marina Mniszech was spared her life – after she had rejected her royal title – and sent back to Poland in July 1608.

With his help, Marina turned up in Tushino, where she would secretly marry another impostor False Dmitry II, after supposedly recognizing him as her husband.

Polish hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski wrote in his memoirs that the only two things False Dmitris I and II had in common was that "they were both human and usurpers".

His henchmen called Marina Mniszech's son "Ivan Dmitriyevich" (literally Ivan, son of Dmitri), however, Patriarch Hermogenes would later dub[citation needed] him an "offspring of the rebel/criminal" (voryonok; at the time, the word "vor" which now means thief, meant "political criminal").

Marina Mniszech appears as a character in Alexander Pushkin's blank verse drama Boris Godunov and Modest Mussorgsky's opera of the same name.

Look how having sampled royalty, drunk on a dream, she prostitutes herself to one adventurer after another -- shares now the disgusting bed of a Jew, now the tent of a Cossack, always ready to give herself to whoever can show her a faint hope of a throne which no longer exists.

Look at her brave war, poverty, shame, at the same time negotiating with the King of Poland like one crowned head to another, and then end her most stormy and most extraordinary existence so miserably.

"[9] In Mussorgsky's opera, however, Marina Mniszech's ambitious manipulation of her future husband is shown to be instigated by a Jesuit priest Ercole Rangoni, who eventually threatens her with hellfire unless she seduces the pretender.