The sovereign tsar and grand prince of all Russia Ivan Vasil'evich came to Novgorod the Great, and with him came his son Ivan Ivanovich, and a large army of princes, boyars, a great many soldiers, and 1,500 strel'tsy [archers] from Moscow. . . . And the tsar commanded that the Novgorodians be tortured before him cruelly and fiercely and inhumanly, with many kinds of tortures; the tsar ordered their bodies to be scorched, tortured by a fire made from some [chemical] compound; and he ordered his assistants to tie those tortured people by their hands, feet, and head to the rear of horse-drawn sleighs, one man to each, and to have them swiftly dragged behind those sleighs to the great Volkhov bridge; and he ordered them to be hurled from the bridge into the river Volkhov.  And the sovereign ordered their wives and their children of all ages, male and female, even suckling infants, to be brought to the Volkhov bridge and taken up to a tower built for that purpose, with their hands and feet tied behind them, and the infants tied to their mothers; and the tsar ordered them to be hurled from the great height into the river Volkhov.  Meanwhile his assistants and soldiers were cruising on the Volkhov in small boats, armed with weapons, pitchforks, lances, axes and hooks; and whenever anyone came up to the surface of the water, they would seize him with the hooks, and pierce him with their lances and pitchforks, and hack at him with their axes, and plunge him down into the depths without mercy, delivering him to a cruel death.  Such were the distress and suffering that resulted from the tsar's indomitable fury, and still more from the wrath of God, because of our sins; inasmuch as for five weeks or more, day after day, up to 1,000 people of all ages were thrown into the water daily, and on some days up to 1,500, and it was a fortunate day when only 500 or 600 people were hurled into the river.

When it was over, the sovereign with his soldiers began to visit the monastaries in the neighborhood of Novgorod the Great, and the tsar gave orders to plunder the treasuries of the churches and monastaries . . .; he ordered the unthreshed grain gathered in the barns or stacked in the fields to be burned; and he ordered all livestock, horses, and cows to be slaughtered.  Then he returned to the city with a large army, and gave orders to loot the merchandise in the shops of the merchants in all the marketplaces, and tear down the shops and raze them to the ground.  Then the sovereign with all his soldiers rode all around the city and its posady [suburbs], and he gave orders to loot the possessions of all the townspeople, in their houses, in church basements [in Novgorod church basements were often used for storing merchants' goods], and in their chambers; and he ordered the men and women themselves to be beaten without mercy and without respite, and their households to be plundered, and the windows and doors of their houses to be smashed. . . .