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Upon entering the Kremlin grounds through the arch of the Borovitsky Gate in the midst of the mighty walls of the Kremlin, a flood of dazzling yet gentle light envelops the visitor. Solemnly set back from the steep slope clothed in a festive froth of verdure are the Grand Kremlin Palace and the Armory. The clean line of the walls is rhythmically broken by the verticals of ridge-roofed towers. Down below, beyond the brown-grey mirror of the granite-clad Moskva river, is the boundless expanse of the city enveloped in the haze of early spring warmth, with the light flourish of its skyline on the horizon and the innumerable rows of houses vanishing in the distance, punctuated here and there by the solitary flash of a gilt church dome. With every gust of the impatient wind, the breath of the city arrives in a never-ceasing tide. A vast city. An old city. A lively city….

The history of Moscow and the Kremlin consists of an endless chain of events that go even further back into the hoary past than the eight and a half centuries that are documented in the chronicles. Prince Yuri (or Georgi) one of the younger children of the powerful Vladimir Monomachus was nicknamed Dolgoruky for his indefatigable temperament, his quests for new possessions and his dream of the throne of a Grand Prince. In 1147, as in noted in the Ipatyevskaya Chronicle, he invited one of his princely allies to a meeting in Moscow. This was the first written mention of the city on which an estimate of its age can be based. In 1155, 65-year-old Yuri Dolgoruky ascended the throne in Kiev and a year later he "caused the city of Moscow to be built" at the mouth of the Neglinnaya River not far from upstream from the mouth of another navigable river the Yuasa.

That he "caused the city of Moscow to be built" does not, however, mean that it was built on virgin land. It simply refers to the construction of a new fortress to protect the old settlement on part of Borovsky Hill where the Armory and the Palace of Congress are located today. One of the oldest Slavic cultures, dating to the middle of the 1st millenium BC, takes its name, Dyakovo, from the village near Kolomenskoye, in the suburbs of Moscow, where archeologists uncovered the remains of an ancient settlement. Not long ago potsherds of precisely the same type were unearthed during excavations in Kremlin Hill. As a result the real age of Moscow can be given as about twenty-five hundred years rather than eight and a half centuries.

The site offered various vantages as compared with other fortified towns in Northeastern Russia, and the importance of Moscow in the life of the Slavic lands grew as time wore on. It was situated at the intersection of trade routes which played an ever greater role in the economic life of the Slavs, from Rostov-the-Great, a town closely linked to the West, to the lands of Ryazan, and from Polotsk and Smolensk, which maintained contacts with Poland and Lithuania, to the Rostov Principality. Moscow easily established relations both with faraway Pomorye in the north and with Genoese colonies on the Black Sea. In general, one can hardly speak of isolation from Western Europe for Yuri Dolgoruky himself counted Elizabeth, Queen of Norway, Anna, the wife of Henry I of France, and Anastasia, Queen of Hungary among his grandfather's sisters. Life in Moscow was in many ways similar to life in the medieval cities of Western Europe and the cultural level was the same. In the Muscovites' everyday life, literacy and books and legal documents and, even, the game of draughts were widespread as they were elsewhere. Even before Prince Yuri Dolgoruky began building the defenses, Moscow had fortifications - a 700-metre-long stockade built along the crest of a low value, which was in turn surrounded by a wide moat. After its renovation, the area of the "city" increase markedly. The length of the walls now reached 1200 meters. Built to form of a triangle, they were additionally fortified with a 5-metre-deep moat whose width ranged between 12 and 14 meters.

"Hitzelin made me" reads the Latin inscription on the sword recently found during excavations in Ivan the Great Square in the Kremlin at the bottom of a moat which was once here. This sword is now the oldest specimen of side arms in the collection of the Kremlin museums. Weapons made by Hitzelin, a craftsman who supposedly worked in the Rhineland in 1130-1170, were famous all over Europe. Russian warriors both knew about the existence of these arms and had an opportunity to buy them, for the ties between the land of Moscow and Western Europe were quite active.

It took Moscow a hundred years after the reign of Prince Yuri Dolgoruky to acquire its own prince. Under Alexander Nevsky's will, his youngest son, Daniel, became the first Prince of Moscow. Early in the 13th century, the notion "Muscovites" became generally recognized and quite customary.

At the time trade and crafts were developing in Moscow at a particularly brisk pace. Other lands began to gravitate towards the city all the more, so as it was situated in the center of the territories of the Old Slavic tribes, which together with the Novgorod Slavs constituted the nucleus of what was to become the Great Russian nation.

Today this charred log house reassembled in the underground part of the Annunciation Cathedral is just a museum exhibit, the largest of those that date to the 13th century. An ordinary dwelling house, which somehow miraculous survived a fire, it has preserved for posterity a terrible story of those distant years; a raid by nomads and a city fire. The hard times of the Tatar-Mongol invasion here left a thick layer of coals and ashes on Borovitshy Hill, eloquent evidence of catastrophic fire. Djuveini, a Persian contemporary, had this to say about the devastation of Moscow by Khan Batu's hordes in 1238: "They left nothing but the name of the city behind them". How viable Moscow was how great its economic potentials were become evident from the fact that all the calamities notwithstanding, not only did in not decrease in size, but began outright to grow. Settlers from frontier principalities, which were most subjected to nomad raids, willingly moved here. It was during this period, one of the most difficult in Russian history, that the Muscovites for the first time began using a new building material, stone, whereas formerly they sued only wood.

The fist stone structures were built in Moscow under Prince Daniel Alexandrovich, the first Moscow prince, who thus marked the transformation of Moscow into an independent principality. His name has been preserved to this day in the names of a number of Moscow streets, and the St. Daniel Monastery, dedicated to his heavenly namesake and patron, St. Daniel Stylite, which he originally founded and which has now been returned to the Russian Orthodox Church, also reminds us of him. There is a supposition that it was within the walls of this monastery that Prince Daniel laid the cornerstone of Moscow's first stone church in 1272.