Monastic and court chroniclers

The Russian chronicles

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Kiev, Novgorod, Vladimir, Moscow · 11th–17th centuries · Church Slavonic and Russian

Summarised and illustrated here; the text is not reproduced.

The year-by-year annals kept in the monasteries and courts of Rus’ and Muscovy, which record, among wars and portents, the founding of towns, the building of walls and churches, and the fires that repeatedly destroyed them.

The Moscow chronicles of the later fifteenth century are the main written source for the rebuilding of the Kremlin under Ivan III. They tell how the new Dormition cathedral collapsed in 1474, how the Bolognese engineer Aristotele Fioravanti was brought to rebuild it, and how he was sent first to Vladimir to study the cathedral there, which was to be his model; and they record the brick walls and towers raised by Italian masters from 1485 and the great fires of the 1490s.

The book, part by part

I Moscow under Ivan III

The Dormition cathedral on the Vladimir model (1475–79); the brick walls; the fires and the cleared ground before the walls.

Rules: Build after the model · Clear ground before the wall

Rules drawn from Chronicles

Clear ground before the wall

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.

Build after the model

Build the principal cathedral after an honoured prototype: study the old cathedral that is to be the model and keep its form (five domes, walls divided into bays each crowned with a rounded gable, three apses to the east) while building it with the best new craft.

Cite this page Chris Paton, “Monastic and court chroniclers, The Russian chronicles”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/source/russian-chronicles. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.