In the aftermath of the Imperial Russian Army’s retreat from the Battle of Borodino in early September, French troops under the Emperor Napoleon began to march on Moscow. When they arrived on 14 September, they found the vast majority of the city’s 270,000 inhabitants had abandoned their homes and fled.
Before leaving the city the Moscow military governor, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, is believed to have given the order to burn major public buildings. While the exact cause of the fire is disputed, the majority of historians accept that this fits with the scorched-earth strategy that the Russian army had adopted to weaken the French army’s military logistics.
Arriving in Moscow the following day, Napoleon was horrified that his enemy was prepared to burn such a significant city to the ground rather than surrender it intact. By this time the series of isolated fires had grown to an inferno, driven by the wind and fuelled by the wooden structures that comprised much of Moscow.
On September 18, five days after it began, the fire was finally brought under control thanks to calmer winds and a fortuitously timed rain shower that helped the troops working to extinguish the flames. While major landmarks such as the Kremlin had escaped the inferno, thousands of other buildings were destroyed.
It soon became clear that, although Napoleon had seized Moscow, he was unable to secure a decisive victory over the Russians. By the middle of October his troops were facing the first snows of winter and he voluntarily abandoned the city, which was soon retaken by the Russians.
