Gdańsk

The Teutonic Order had seized the town in 1308 and rebuilt it in the 1320s with returning Lübeck merchants and other German settlers, and as Danzig it joined the Hanseatic League in 1358. Its wealth came down the Vistula: grain, timber, potash and tar from Prussia and Poland. In 1454 the burghers renounced the Order and pledged themselves to Casimir IV of Poland, and in 1457 the king's Great Privilege gave the city its own courts, laws and coinage and freed its trade from tolls throughout Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia.

Under the Polish Crown the city was the kingdom's chief seaport and largest town, Lutheran in faith and jealous of its liberties; the first printed account of Copernicus's heliocentric theory was published here in 1540. When it refused to accept Stephen Báthory as king, he besieged it for six months and destroyed its mercenary army in the field in 1577, yet unable to take the walls he settled for a confirmation of its privileges and 200,000 guldens in gold. The city stayed Polish until the partitions: Prussia annexed it in 1793, and Napoleon made it a free city from 1807 to 1814.