One of the buildings destroyed by the fire was the old Kremlin Palace located here.

The Fire of Moscow (1571) occurred in May of that year when the forces of the Crimean khan Devlet I Giray raided the city. The khan set the suburbs on May 24 and a sudden wind blew the flames into Moscow and the city went up in a conflagration. According to Heinrich von Staden, a German in the service of Ivan the Terrible (he claimed to be a member of the Oprichnina)," the city, the palace, the Oprichnina palace, and the suburbs burned down completely in six hours. It was a great disaster because no one could escape."^[2] People fled into stone churches to escape the flames, but the stone churches collapsed (either from the intensity of the fire or the pressure of the crowds.) People also jumped into the Moscow River to escape, where many drowned. The powder magazine of the Kremlin exploded and those hiding in the cellar there asphyxiated.^[3] The tsar ordered the dead found on the streets to be thrown into the river, which overflowed its banks and flooded parts of the town. Jerome Horsey wrote that it took more than a year to clear away all the bodies.^[4]

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire of Moscow (1571)