Gomel

Gomel stands on the high bank of the Sozh, a tributary of the Dnieper. Algirdas brought the Gomel lands into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1335, and they were held as princely appanages into the 1430s. During the Russo-Lithuanian war of 1500–03 the town went over to Moscow. Lithuanian troops retook it in 1535 after the Muscovite governor surrendered, and Sigismund the Old founded a starostwo there. Gomel received a coat of arms in 1560 and Magdeburg law in 1670.

After 1569 the town lay in the path of Cossack and Russian forays into the Commonwealth. In 1621 the Uniate archbishop Josaphat Kuntsevych had the Orthodox St Nicholas cathedral closed; Cossacks besieged Gomel in 1633 and took it in 1648. In 1775 Catherine II gave Gomel to Field Marshal Rumyantsev, who replaced the wooden castle with a stone palace, built in 1785–93.