Owing to the renewed importance of Russia in the affairs of Christendom, and the observations handed down to posterity by the ambassadors and commercial agents who penetrated into the bleak and reputedly barbarous regions of “Muscouvie,” the appearance and life of the isolated capital in this century stands out with a hitherto unwonted clearness. Hemmed in on all sides with thick forests, from whence, down the Moskva river, was floated the timber of which the houses were mostly built, the city stood in a setting of open meadows, swarming with hares and roebuck, which were reserved for the Grand Prince’s exclusive hunting. Fields and gardens and monasteries straggled so far into the outskirts (or slobodas) that it was difficult to tell exactly where the line of demarcation lay; for besides the Moskva on one side, and the ditch-like Neglina on the other, there were “no useful defences in the shape of walls, fosses, or ramparts.”[115] The Kreml, or citadel, and in time the inner quarters of the town, were however strongly fortified. As is frequently the case in cities with Oriental characteristics, squalor and magnificence were strangely jumbled together. Mean huts and booths were interspersed with cupola-crowned churches and public buildings, which, designed for the most part by Byzantine and Italian artists, presented a quaint and not unpleasing confusion of eastern and western architecture. Despite the “forty times forty churches” which were springing up all over Moskva, the cleanliness which is supposed to accompany godliness was conspicuously absent. “This city” wrote the Imperial ambassador at the Court of Vasili, “is so broad and spacious, and so very dirty, that bridges have been constructed here and there in the highways and streets and in the other more distinguished parts.” Here, then, in this straggling wood-built metropolis, this germ-cell of the Russian Empire, dwelt the Grand Princes who were slowly evolving into Great White Tzars; amid a surrounding of cathedrals and mud, holy ikons and squalid hovels, dedicated gates and buildings topped with quaint bulbous domes and cupolas, gold, blue, and silver, moved the rulers of the Moskovite state. Hedged round with dreary ceremonial, waited on by courtiers and chamberlains and servants, clad in long flowing robes that smacked more of Bagdad than of Rome or Wien, the sovereigns of “all Russia” dwelt in a world apart from outside influences, and could only measure things by their own standard.