Iaşi

Iași spreads over the hills above the Bahlui in eastern Moldavia, where the princes kept one of their courts, close to the Polish and Tatar frontier. A German crusader mentions it in 1396, and in 1408 Prince Alexander the Good granted trade privileges here to the merchants of Lviv. In 1564 Alexandru Lăpușneanu moved the capital of Moldavia here from Suceava, and the market town grew quickly as craftsmen and merchants came from Armenia, Poland, Hungary, France and Venice.

The city burned many times: Tatars set it alight in 1513, the Ottomans in 1538, and in 1650 Cossacks and Tatars, angered by Prince Vasile Lupu's refusal to marry his daughter to Timuș Khmelnytsky, burned it down. Under Lupu it was a centre of learning: the Trei Ierarhi Monastery was built in 1635–39, and a school and printing press opened there. Princes founded the Princely Academy in 1707. Greek Phanariot rulers later made it a Greek-speaking court, while plague and repeated fires hit the wooden town, and in 1821 Alexander Ypsilantis raised the Filiki Eteria rising here.