Vitebsk

Vitebsk grew at the mouth of the Vitba, where it joins the Western Dvina. Its river harbour lay on routes between the Baltic and Black Sea basins. A chronicle mentions the town in 1021, when Yaroslav of Kyiv ceded it to Bryachislav of Polotsk; by the twelfth century it was the centre of a principality of its own. The town passed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1320, and stone upper and lower castles and a princely palace guarded its riverbanks.

Vitebsk became the centre of a voivodeship in 1508. Its religious divisions erupted in 1623, when townspeople protesting the imposition of the church union killed the Uniate archbishop Josaphat Kuntsevych. Commonwealth authorities punished the city by executing leading townsmen, withdrawing its Magdeburg rights and destroying the town hall. Catholic monasteries also shaped the city: in 1676 the voivode Jan Chrapowicki founded a Bernardine monastery and church of Saint Anthony. During the Great Northern War, Vitebsk was burned on the orders of Peter I.

In 1772 the first partition of the Commonwealth brought Vitebsk under Russian rule. Four decades later Napoleon occupied the city during his invasion of Russia. In July 1812 he contemplated halting his campaign there and giving his army rest, but the concentration of Russian forces at Smolensk persuaded him to advance again. The old river city thus became a stopping place in a campaign that carried the conflict far beyond the Dvina.