Tartu

Tartu, called Dorpat by its German burghers, lies on the Emajõgi below Toome Hill, where the bishop's stone castle and cathedral stood after the crusaders took the old Estonian hill fort in 1224. For more than three centuries it was the seat of the bishops of Dorpat and one of the richest towns of Old Livonia, a Hanseatic member living off trade between Russia and Western Europe. Its council is first recorded in 1262, and in the fourteenth century the town held four monasteries.

Tartu's first golden age ended in the Livonian War. Ivan IV's army took the town in 1558, the bishop was carried off to Moscow, and in 1571 its German inhabitants were deported to Russia. Poland held it from 1583, with a short Swedish interval in 1601–03, and Sweden captured it for good in 1625. In 1632 Gustavus Adolphus founded the university here, the Academia Gustaviana, which moved to Pärnu in 1699 as the Great Northern War closed in. Peter the Great took Dorpat in 1704; in 1708 its fortifications, the bishop's castle and the houses were blown up and its citizens deported. The wooden town burned again in the great fire of 1775, and Catherine II presented it with a stone bridge.