Kremenchuk

Kremenchuk stands on the Dnieper, at a crossing between the settled river country and the steppe. Plans for a fortress were made in 1571, though the site remained sparsely settled for decades. In 1635 the engineer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan built a small fort, and the town received Magdeburg rights. Its place on the river would make it important to both military commanders and merchants.

The Khmelnytskyi uprising brought Kremenchuk into the Cossack Hetmanate. It briefly had a regiment of its own in 1661–63, but the wars over Ukraine brought repeated changes of control, and the town was burned during a siege in 1663. After the Truce of Andrusovo it came under Russian rule and slowly recovered. In the eighteenth century Kremenchuk briefly served as the capital of the Novorossiya governorate before plague and flooding damaged it in the 1780s. Its river trade continued as the old fortress declined.