On the 12th of April, 1547, the cry of fire alarmed the inhabitants, and soon the flames were spreading with fury which baffled all human power.  The store-houses of commerce, the magazines of the crown, the convent of Epiphany and a large number of dwellings, extending from the gate of Illinsky, to the Kremlin and the Moskwa, were consumed.  The river alone arrested the destruction.  A powder magazine took fire, and with a terrible explosion its towers were thrown into the air, taking with them a large section of the walls.  The ruins fell like an avalanche into the river, completely filling up its channel, adding the destruction of a deluge to that of the fire.

A week had hardly passed ere the cry of fire again was raised, and, in a few hours, the whole section of the city on the other side of the Yaouza was in ashes.  This region was mostly occupied by mechanics and manufacturers, and immense suffering ensued.  Six weeks elapsed, and the inhabitants were just beginning to recover from their consternation, and were sweeping away the ashes to rebuild, when on the 20th of June, the wind at the time blowing a gale, the fearful cry of fire again rang through the streets.  The palaces of the nobles were now in flames.  The palace of the Kremlin itself, the gorgeous streets which surrounded it, and the whole of the grand faubourg in a few moments were glowing like a furnace.  God had come with flaming fire as his minister of vengeance, and resistance was unavailing.  The whole city was now in ashes, and presented the aspect of an immense funeral pile, over which was spread a pall of thick and black smoke.  The wooden edifices disappeared entirely.  Those of stone and brick presented a still more gloomy aspect, with only portions of their walls standing, crumbling and blackened.  The howling of the tempest, the roar of the flames, the crash of falling buildings, and the shrieks of the inhabitants, were all frequently overpowered by the explosions of the powder magazines in the arsenals of the Kremlin.

To many of the people it seemed that the day of judgment had actually arrived, that the trump of the archangel was sounding, and that the final conflagration had arrived.  The palace of the emperor, his treasures, his precious things, his arms, his venerated images and the archives of the kingdom, all were devoured.  The destruction of the city was almost as entire and as signal a proof of the divine displeasure as that of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Even the metropolitan bishop, who was in the church of the Assumption, pleading for divine interposition, was with great difficulty rescued.  Smothered, and in a state almost of insensibility, he was conveyed through billows of flame and smoke.  Seventeen hundred adults, besides uncounted children, perished in the fire.