Early Years
Mikhail Miloradovich was the son of Major General Andrey Miloradovich (1726–1798). The Russian branch of the Serbian Miloradovich family was established in 1715, when Mikhail Miloradovich (the first) (Serbian: Михаило Милорадовић, Serbian Latin: Mihailo Miloradović), one of three brothers recruited by Peter I to incite rebellion against the Turks four years earlier, fled from Herzegovina to Russia and joined Peter's service as a colonel. He was a commander of the Hadiach Regiment. Towards the end of Peter's reign he was imprisoned in connection with Pavlo Polubotok's treason case, but was spared from further misfortune by Peter's death. His grandson Andrey served thirty years in the Russian Army and later moved into civil administration as the Governor of Little Russia and the Chernigov governorate. The family owned lands in the Poltava Governorate; Mikhail inherited up to fifteen hundred serfs.
Mikhail's father "enrolled" him in the military in his infancy, and later sent teenage Mikhail to study military sciences in the universities of Königsberg and Göttingen, and in Strasbourg and Metz. According to Nikolai Leskov, the education was superficial: Leskov described Mikhail as a boy of "charming ignorance" who did not even master the French language properly, and said that his French was littered with the "most grave and curious mistakes" (an anecdote credited him with blending pittoresque and synagogue into "pittagogue"). Sixteen-year-old Mikhail returned to Russia in 1787, joined the army as a praporshchik (a junior commissioned officer rank) in the Izmaylovsky Regiment and was soon sent into action in the Russo-Swedish War of 1788–1790.
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