Moscow

It may be difficult for Westerners to appreciate what an important place Moscow holds in the Russian imagination as a symbol of spiritual and political power. Throughout much of its history the city was known as Holy Moscow, and was valued as a point of pilgrimage not unlike Jerusalem, Mecca, or Rome. Founded in the 12th century as the center of one of several competing minor principalities, Moscow eventually emerged as the heart of a unified Russian state in the 15th century. One hundred years later it had grown into the capital of a strong and prosperous realm, one of the largest in the world. Although civil war and Polish invasion ravaged the city in the early 17th century, a new era of stability and development began with the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. More »