A Russian town of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the Moscow pattern: a brick kremlin on the promontory where two rivers meet, holding the cathedrals, the bell tower and the palace; a cleared market square before its landward gate; and a wooden posad of log houses in fenced yards, ringed by a palisade.
A Russian town began with its fortress, the kremlin or detinets, set on high ground where rivers gave it natural moats. Herberstein, who saw Moscow in 1517 and 1526, describes the fortress on the point between the Moskva and the Neglinnaya, with brick walls and towers holding the palaces of the prince and the metropolitan and many churches; Ivan III had rebuilt it with Italian engineers from the 1480s. Inside, the cathedrals stood round one square. When the Dormition cathedral was rebuilt in 1475–79, the chronicle says, the architect was sent first to Vladimir to study the old cathedral there as his model; hence its five domes and its walls crowned with round gables.
Outside the walls lay the posad, the town of traders and craftsmen: a city of wood. Herberstein says Moscow looked larger than it was because every house stood in its own yard and garden; Olearius, a century later, describes the log houses notched at the corners and caulked with moss, and a market where whole houses were sold ready to be set up. Wooden towns burned constantly. After the great fire of 1493, the chronicles record, Ivan III had the houses and churches cleared from a broad strip before the Kremlin wall; the open ground became the market square, later called Red Square.
This model is a schematic Muscovite town rather than a survey of Moscow: the kremlin, its cathedrals and towers stand in their typical relation, the posad streets radiate from the market square to the palisade, and the parish churches of the posad are of wood, as most were. Stone was for the prince, the metropolitan and the richest merchants.