Tallinn

The Danish hold did not outlast the great Estonian rising of St George's Night in 1343: three years later Valdemar IV sold Reval and the rest of northern Estonia to the Teutonic Order for 19,000 Köln marks. Under its new masters the merchant town flourished. Some 8,000 people lived behind walls with 66 towers, and the staple right obliged goods passing through the port to go through the hands of Reval's own merchants. The city turned Lutheran in the 1520s, and when the Order's state broke apart in the Livonian War it placed itself under Swedish protection in 1561, then held out against a Russian siege in 1570–1571. Swedish rule lasted until 1710, when Reval, ravaged by plague in the Great Northern War, surrendered to Russia; the tsars left its town council and the Estonian nobility their old self-government.