Rzeszów

Rzeszów lies on the Wisłok River and received town rights in 1354. Trade routes connecting Kraków with Lwów and Lublin with the south helped the town recover from fires and attacks in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Jewish settlement is recorded from the fifteenth century.

From the 1580s its owner Mikołaj Spytek Ligęza invested in a castle, Bernardine church and monastery. The town passed to the Lubomirski family in 1638, and a college opened in 1658. Swedish and other armies damaged Rzeszów during later wars; after the first partition of Poland in 1772 it came under Austrian rule in Galicia.