Prince Boris Galitzin, a very smart young officer in the Chevalier-Gardes, a famous leader of cotillons in the great houses of St. Petersburg, was going to Moscow with his wife at the same time as myself, and so we had agreed to meet and lionize the famous old city together. It was of course a great advantage to me, for not only had I very pleasant friends, whose company was a joy, but I also benefited by certain special permits with which they were armed. What treasures we saw!—gold, silver, precious stones and pearls. What holy relics did Boris have to kiss!—not that he, as an advanced Greek, had much faith in them or in their miracles; his reverence for them was something like that of Naaman the Syrian, when he prayed that if he should enter the house of Rimmon with his master leaning upon his hand, he might be forgiven for bowing himself down because it was a question of duty. The French in 1812 looted as much as they could, but on their approach the treasures and relics were sent off to Novgorod. They must, in spite of all precautions, have found a great deal, for the wealth of the churches is prodigious. One holy Saint stopped their robberies by a miracle. The ruffians were about to rifle his tomb when the corpse slowly lifted its hand in warning. They fled, terror-stricken at the sign, but the dead hand remained raised, a threat for ever against sacrilege. It is really no matter of surprise that there should be so few buildings of great antiquity, so few ancient historical monuments in Russia. It is true that at Kief, the old capital of the Grand Princes, Jaroslav built the stone church of St. Sophia in the middle of the eleventh century, about the same time as the Conqueror built the Tower of London, but it was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that houses of stone began to be the fashion. Till then the dwellings of rich and poor alike were built of wood upon piles, much like the homes of their Scythian forbears, described by Herodotus. As a consequence fire had freedom of destruction, as it has in many great Oriental cities, where I have seen whole quarters burned to ashes in a single night; and so it was that when Ivan, the son of Daniel, established his capital at Moscow in 1330, it was no more than a great aggregation of wooden houses, the only stone building being the Church of Spas na Bory (the Saviour on the Cross), which was said to be of immense antiquity. It was not until the end of the fourteenth century that Dmitri Donski, the conqueror of the Tartars on the Don, began building the famous Kremlin.[49] By degrees came trade, and merchants from all parts of the world, bartering their goods against Muscovite furs, cloth, linen and leather, for which Russia had already become famous.