In the middle of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, two great fires almost annihilated the city. The first broke out in the merchants’ quarter and the second burned the Tsar’s palace to cinders. The infuriated populace laid both these fires to the account of the witchcraft of Princess Glinski, the widow of a man who had died in prison, after his eyes had been put out as a punishment for having rebuked Ivan’s mother, Helen, for her conduct with her lover, Ortchina. One of the supposed witch’s sons was murdered with his followers at an altar on which they had taken refuge for sanctuary, and the wretched woman herself fled for her life with her other son. What an easy matter revenge was in the days when men believed in witchcraft? But in spite of fires and Poles and other misfortunes, Moscow continued to flourish in ever-increasing beauty, until at the beginning of the eighteenth century Peter the Great, in love with the sea and with ships, must needs transfer the seat of government to his newly-founded seaport, and so gave the death-blow to the political, or perhaps it would be more true to say the official, importance of the old capital. But there was more than the intoxication of the sea in his move. So long as Moscow should remain unrivalled on a pinnacle of glory, so long would the old faith and the glamour of old traditions remain as an obstacle to the Germanizing reforms which he had at heart. These old feelings—which he knew how to turn to profit at his need, while he affected to despise them—must be swept away. As a stronghold of the Church the Sacred City—Moscow and the Patriarchate—had even in the most savage days stood between the Tsar and his will. Let them perish! So the Court and the Government were gone, and the Patriarchate with them. But all these changes—the plucking of beards literally and figuratively from men’s chins, the wholesale attack upon all those customs which were dearest to the Russian soul—were in one respect a failure. The dignity, the sanctity of Moscow remained untouched. No spark of its sacred light was extinguished. To every true child of Russia Moscow remained the Holy Mother. Witness 1812. Napoleon would have met with a less fierce opposition had he attacked St. Petersburg. That would have been warfare. What Peter did was sacrilege. It was a pious Russian, Rostopchin, who once more set fire to Moscow lest the sacred city with its stores of provisions and necessaries should fall into the hands of the impious invader. What a difference that fire made to the horrors of the terrible retreat!