Suceava

Suceava lies on the Suceava river at the edge of the Carpathian foothills in northern Moldavia, where Prince Petru Mușat moved the capital from Siret and issued a charter dated in Suceava Fortress in 1388. For nearly two centuries it was the princely seat of Moldavia, with a wooden princely house inside the fortress that Alexander the Good rebuilt after 1400 with stone walls. In 1401 the Moldavian metropolitan church was established here, and the Mirăuți church served as its cathedral.

Alexander the Good gave Lviv merchants trade privileges in 1408, and Suceava became a storage point for cloth and Moldavia's export goods. Under Stephen the Great, who reigned from 1457 and died here in 1504, the fortress was rebuilt in stone. In 1476 Sultan Mehmed II failed to take it, and in 1497 the Polish king's cannon battered its walls for twenty-one days without success. After Alexandru Lăpușneanu moved the capital to Iași in the mid-1560s, the fortress declined; Michael the Brave held Suceava briefly in 1600, and it was destroyed in 1675. In 1775 the town passed to the Habsburgs with Bukovina.