Fire of Moscow (1547)

The great fire of Moscow in 1547 destroyed sections of Moscow which had been built almost entirely of wood. The fire began on June 24, several months after Ivan IV was officially crowned as first Tsar of Russia. The fire swept into the Kremlin and blew up the powder stores in several of the Kremlin's towers. [Isabel de Madariaga, "Ivan the Terrible. First Tsar of Russia" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 61.]

The fire displaced about 80,000 people and killed about 2,700 to 3,700 (not including children, [Madariaga, "Ivan the Terrible", 62.] and led to wide-spread poverty among the survivors. Metropolitan Makarii was apparently injured in the fire when the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin was threatened by the flames and the metropolitan was taken out through a breach in the Kremlin walls and let down by rope into the Moscow River. He may have never fully recovered from his injuries, although he lived another 16 years. [Madariaga, "Ivan the Terrible", 61.]

The Muscovites put the blame on the tsar's maternal relatives from the Glinski family. A rebellion began and Yuri Glinski was stoned to death inside the Cathedral of the Dormition in front of a horrified Metropolitan Makarii. Yuri's brother, Mikhail Glinski attempted to flee to Lithuania but failed, and his mother, Anna - the tsar's grandmother - was accused of using sorcery to start the fire. [Madariaga, "Ivan the Terrible", 62.] The rebellion resulted in the fall of the Glinski party and eventually strengthened the positions of the young tsar, although he did not hand his grandmother over to the mob as they demanded.

References

*Аванта: "Российские столицы. Москва и Санкт-Петербург" (2001) (ISBN 5-8483-0041-0).
*Аванта: "История России" (1996) (ISBN 5-86277-003-8).