Rawa

Rawa was a seat of the dukes of Mazovia, whose brick castle rose in the low ground where the Rawka and Rylka meet. The town later became the centre of Rawa Voivodeship under the Polish Crown. Its castle held a treasury of unusual importance, administered by the royal starosta: from 1569 the quarter tax collected from royal estates was stored securely here to pay the Polish Crown's regular standing troops.

Jesuits established themselves in Rawa in the early seventeenth century and completed a college in 1622. The writer Jan Chryzostom Pasek was among its pupils. Wars of the century damaged the town and castle, but the surviving tower still marks the place where the treasury and the old ducal residence once stood.