Bacǎu

Bacău grew beside a ford of the Bistrița, near its meeting with the Siret and the road through the Carpathians to Transylvania. A market and a Roman Catholic community helped shape the town, whose inhabitants included Hungarian and German settlers as well as Romanians. In 1408 Alexander the Good named Bacău among Moldavia's customs stations in a privilege for Polish merchants. In 1439 the income from its customs house was granted to the nearby Orthodox Bistrița monastery.

Moldavian princes kept a residence here in the fifteenth century. Stephen the Great enlarged it and built an Orthodox church, but the court was abandoned after 1500. Bacău suffered when King Matthias Corvinus burned towns along his route during his 1467 campaign against Stephen; later customs records suggest a decline in its merchants' trade across the mountains. In 1597 the Catholic bishop of Argeș moved his seat to Bacău after his Wallachian see had been devastated.

Archbishop Marco Bandini recorded in 1646 that the town's elected head alternated between Hungarians and Romanians. Repeated invasions and Tatar raids in the seventeenth century drove many Catholic inhabitants to seek refuge in Transylvania. The town maintained an elected head and judges, with privileges over local affairs. Yet the churches and the surviving princely court continued to recall Bacău's place in the diverse religious and commercial life of Moldavia.