Its effects were violent on large areas, the hardest hit being Bucharest, where several houses and churches collapsed.

[1] According to the catalogue of Cornelius Radu, several foreshocks of magnitude 5–6 occurred starting with March 1738.

In a book of hours it appears that on 31 May the earth was shaken, and even "split and came out water with smell of gunpowder and brimstone".

A Slavo-Romanian psalter gives information about the intensity of the earthquake: "the earth trembled in the month of May, on 31, midday, very strong, and went to the east and again turned backward.

[8] In From yesterday Bucharest (Romanian: Din Bucureștii de ieri), George Potra reminds that the calamity "began with a great roaring".