It is not possible to establish the exact number of fires in Moscow, as it is difficult to establish the exact time of the city’s formation. Initially, Moscow was a few disparate villages that were united by wooden and earthen fortifications. The only building material was wood, so in all likelihood, fires occurred there quite often, especially since the houses were heated by wood-burning stoves.
There is evidence that wooden Moscow burned out completely once every 20-30 years, and local fires occurred almost daily. The first major fire recorded in the annals dates back to 1177. Prince Ryazan Gleb Vladimirovich went up to the Kremlin and "burned all Moscow, the city and villages" - this is written in the annals.
Then, from 1328 to 1343, four major fires occurred, despite the fact that in 1339 Ivan Kalita rebuilt the Kremlin walls from oak, almost a yard in diameter, and the walls were covered with clay for prevention. In 1365, the largest fire at that time in Moscow, the Vsesvyatsky, occurred. The catastrophe was aggravated by an unprecedented drought, which did not allow putting out the fire: “If the drought is great then, the storm is also one hundred great, and metash for ten yards of bunt and bern with fire, and not extinguished: in a single place ghashihu, and at ten you catch fire, and not before the name was tucked out, but the whole fire will be consumed."
From 1368 to 1493, the Lithuanian prince Olgerd, Tokhtamysh, Edigey, and the Polovtsy set fire to Moscow. Every time after the fires Moscow rebuilt almost from scratch. In the end, Ivan III builds hydraulic structures around the Kremlin and organizes a regime of increased fire safety in the city, like a curfew.
In the XVI century, Moscow burned repeatedly, and in 1547, the cause of the fire was the explosion of gunpowder in the Kremlin arsenals. In 1571, the Crimean Tatars burned the city under the leadership of Devlet Giray - the city completely burned out in 3 hours, according to various sources, from 120 to 800 thousand people burned down. The fire that destroyed 100-200 yards was not considered a serious fire, no records were made of it. Significant was the fire of 1712, which was not only the cause of major destruction, then less than a hundred people died. The fire destroyed the foundry in which the Tsar Bell was cast, as a result of which a splinter broke off from it, and the bell remained forever "dumb." There is a version that a fire flared up from a dropped candle placed behind the husband’s repose as a soldier’s widow - from this came the expression "Moscow burned from a penny candle."
The last major fire was the fire of 1812, after which Moscow was restored in stone form, and the fires ceased to be a catastrophic disaster. Relatively large fires can be considered the fires of the Maly and Bolshoi theaters (1837 and 1853) and the fire on Presnya in 1905, which arose as a result of shelling during the December uprising.
