"He is nowe become a Prince of subjects, and not of slaves, kept within duty and loyalty by love and not by feare and tyranny. He is comely of stature, of countenance well-favoured and majesticalle withal; affable in behaviour and yet of great courage, wyse, politick, grave; merciful, a lover of virtue and goodness, a hater of wicked men, and a severe punisher of injustice. _In summa_, he is a most rare prince as ever reigned over these people as any I have ever read of in their chronicles, which are of great antiquity." In 1601 Moscow was in a state of famine, the like of which it had never known. In a short time 3 roubles would not buy as much food as 15 copecks had done formerly. Driven wild by hunger the Muscovites committed fearful atrocities. Men were entrapped, killed and eaten. It is said that some mothers killed and ate their own children; pies of human flesh were sold openly; many thousand corpses remained unburied in the streets; chroniclers state that half a million perished of famine and disease. To alleviate some of the misery, Boris caused the granaries and stores to be burst open, and the food avarice withheld sold at normal prices. Boris built two new palaces of stone within the Kremlin; had made a map of the Russian dominions, and a plan of Moscow. To find employment for the poor he caused the belfry tower of Ivan Veliki to be constructed, and did his utmost to win the love of the citizens. He had to combat treason and intrigue; his reprisals were severe, but the victims suffered in secret. [Illustration: CHURCH OF THE ASSUMPTION] The Belskis and Romanofs were ill-treated; the head of the latter house was forced to become a monk, and took the name of Philaret; his wife to become a nun, under the name of Marfa. One of the most remarkable specimens of Muscovite architecture has survived from Boris Godunov's day, the church of the Assumption he built on the Pokrovka. Like other churches of mediæval Moscow, its chief entrance is by steps to a second storey, but unlike them it is carried much higher and appears more like a collection of buildings piled upon each other. Thirteen cupolas, at different heights, are arranged around the central dome. A covered gallery surrounds the church on the main storey, and the logia beneath was, until recently, divided and let as shops.