Vilnius

Vilnius stands where the small Vilnia meets the Neris, under Gediminas Hill, whose wooden castle made it the seat of the Lithuanian grand dukes. Gediminas called it his royal city in a letter of 1323 and invited German merchants, craftsmen and Jews to settle, while the Orthodox and Catholic churches of his Ruthenian and German subjects stood beside the pagan sanctuary of the old Lithuanians. The Teutonic Knights repeatedly raided and burned the town, until Grand Duke Jogaila's baptism in 1386 and the conversion of Lithuania in 1387 brought a cathedral, a bishopric and Magdeburg rights.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Vilnius became a capital in stone. The city wall was raised in the early 1500s, and the Gate of Dawn with its icon of Our Lady is one of its surviving gates. Grand Duke Sigismund the Old and his Italian queen Bona Sforza brought Renaissance builders, and the Jesuits founded Vilnius University in 1579. The city's council was split evenly between Catholics and Orthodox, and Poles, Ruthenians, Germans, Jews and Tatars lived side by side.

Russian troops took and burned the capital in 1655, and the court moved away; plague and war emptied it again in the early 1700s. Even so, Jewish scholarship made it a learned city, and Baroque churches rose across it. Russia annexed Vilnius in 1795, and in 1812 Napoleon's Grand Army passed through it on the road to Moscow and back.