Kazimierz

Kazimierz Dolny stands on the Vistula in the Lublin country. Under Casimir the Great it developed as a royal town with a castle, parish church and market square. Władysław Jagiełło granted Magdeburg law in 1406, the same year as the first recorded mention of its Jewish inhabitants. The river carried grain from Lesser Poland toward Gdańsk, while intersecting overland routes connected merchants travelling between eastern lands, Silesia and Greater Poland.

This combination sustained the town's commercial growth, with its strongest prosperity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Warfare later damaged the trading settlement and weakened the conditions on which its wealth depended. Political sovereignty changed again with the partitions: Kazimierz entered the Austrian partition, passed to the Duchy of Warsaw in 1809, and became part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815. Its history joins the institutions of a royal market town to the opportunities and vulnerabilities of Vistula commerce.