Novgorod, which he ruthlessly destroyed, was one of the oldest commonwealths in Europe, antedating that of Florence in Italy. The city was larger than London at that time. It was a place rich in historic memories and linked with the whole past of Russia whose capital it had been six centuries before Moscow was built and a thousand years before the founding of St. Petersburg.
This ancient capital was a proud, wealthy, and luxurious city, enclosed within a circuit of fifty miles of walls and containing at this time perhaps four hundred thousand people.
Ivan knew that it hated his rule and suspected that it desired to be taken under the protection of Sweden. He swore that he would raze Novgorod and sow its site with salt. He invaded it with an army of thirty thousand Tartars and for six weeks personally directed the ravaging of its fields and the burning and destruction of the city. He ordered his soldiers to burn, slay, and give no quarter to old or young. Like Nero in the great circus when Christians were slaughtered for his amusement, Ivan personally took a hand in the wholesale butchery, the streets ran with blood, and the river was actually choked with the bodies of the dead. Over sixty thousand people lost their lives in the general scramble and terror. Novgorod never recovered from this catastrophe and has remained to this day a village. Other smaller cities shared the same fate.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
