Divide each wall into bays with pilaster strips and end each bay in a semicircular gable, the zakomara, that follows the curve of the barrel vault behind it; shape the roof to the gables.
usually 3 zakomary per façade, one per bay
The fortress on the point between two rivers
Set the kremlin on the high ground where two rivers meet, so that water guards two sides; wall it with towers at the corners and gates, dig a moat along the landward side, and put within it the cathedral, the prince’s palace and the metropolitan’s court.
Herberstein describes Moscow’s fortress on the promontory between the Moskva and the Neglinnaya, walled in brick, containing the palaces of the prince and the metropolitan and many churches, with the town spreading beyond. The pattern is older than Moscow (the detinets of Novgorod, Pskov and Vladimir stood on similar sites), and it was repeated in the kremlins of Tula, Kolomna, Zaraysk and Nizhny Novgorod in the sixteenth century.
Ivan III rebuilt the Moscow walls from the 1480s with Italian engineers, who gave them the swallow-tailed merlons of Milanese castles; a moat was dug along the landward side in 1508.
Related rules
Keep a broad strip before the kremlin wall free of houses and churches, so that fire in the wooden town cannot reach the fortress and defenders have an open field of fire; let the market be held on it.
Lay the posad out in streets radiating from the market square, and give every household a fenced yard with its house, barn, bath-house and garden, so that houses stand apart among gardens rather than in rows.
Build the house of whole logs laid horizontally and notched into one another at the corners, their ends left projecting; stop the joints with moss; roof it with boards or birch bark on a steep pitch; raise the living room on a lower storey where the ground is damp.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The fortress on the point between two rivers”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/kremlin-confluence. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.