Lviv

Lviv was founded under Daniel of Galicia, who named it for his son Leo; it is first mentioned in 1256, and from about 1272 it was the capital of the kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia. When Prince Yury II died in 1340, Casimir III of Poland attacked the Lviv and Przemyśl lands. In 1356 he refounded the town under Magdeburg law, moving the centre south of the old princely hill and having builders raise a Gothic walled town around a market square, mostly peopled by Germans, alongside Ruthenian, Armenian and Jewish quarters. In 1379 Lviv, on the silk road from Crimea to Germany, won the staple right, which obliged every merchant passing through to put his goods on sale there for two weeks.

In the fifteenth century Lviv was Lemberg, a city whose council recorded its decisions in German; after 1434 it was the capital of the Ruthenian Voivodeship. The Ottoman advance cut its trade, and in 1527 a fire burned the Gothic town to the ground. The Dormition Brotherhood opened a school there in the second half of the sixteenth century, and the printer Ivan Fedorov worked in the city. By 1630 some 25,000 to 30,000 people lived there, more than in any other town of the Ukrainian lands. Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks besieged it in 1648, Charles XII's army took it in 1704, and in 1772 Austria made it the capital of Galicia and Lodomeria.