with walls and widefirebreaks separating the town into neighborhoods:first the
Kremlin, then the“Kitaigorod”trading neighborhood, beyond that the“White
Town,”and beyond that, already by the end of the sixteenth century, the“Earthen”
town. Whole neighborhoods could be dedicated to a particular craft, such as those
of the“armorers”(bronnaia), smiths (kuznetskaia), and leather workers (kozhevni-
cheskaia). Moscow fortified the walls between these sections for defense in the
sixteenth century, turning earthen ramparts into brick edifices: the Kitaigorod wall
received twenty-nine towers and eleven gates in a 1584–91 renovation, while the
Earthen (zemlianyi) wall had no fewer thanfifty towers. Some borderland towns
took a simple rectangular orientation with four walls of a wooden fort.
The citadel of a major town was surrounded by a powerful wall that enclosed at
least one church or cathedral, state offices, palaces and homes for secular rulers,
dignitaries, hierarchs, and bureaucrats. From such a center radial streets often led
out to the major highways. Moscow had several gates, each labeled for the towns
towards which its road led (Smolensk, Tver’-Novgorod, Dmitrov, Iaroslavl’,
Figure 11.1Adam Olearius’map of Moscow depicts its circular growth out from the
Kremlin, with city neighborhoods (Kremlin, Kitaigorod, Belyi gorod) separated by wide
firebreaks. From the 1727 Amsterdam edition. With permission of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Towns and Townsmen 237