Warsaw

The move of 1596 had been long in the making. Warsaw had been the capital of the Dukes of Mazovia since 1413, and when their line died out and Mazovia passed to the Crown in 1526, its place midway between Kraków and Vilnius made it the natural meeting ground of the joined realms. The General Sejm first met here in 1529 and sat here permanently from 1569, and in 1573 the Warsaw Confederation, which guaranteed religious freedom in the Commonwealth, took the city's name. Being the capital had its price: between 1655 and 1658 Swedish, Brandenburg and Transylvanian armies besieged and pillaged it.

In the 18th century the Saxon kings Augustus II and Augustus III brought in German architects who gave the city a look of Dresden, and the Załuski Library, Poland's first public library, opened here in 1747. Stanisław August Poniatowski rebuilt the interiors of the Royal Castle and laid out the Royal Baths, and Warsaw became known as the Paris of the North. Prussia annexed it in the final partition of 1795, but it rose again as the capital of Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw and then of a Kingdom of Poland under the tsar. In November 1830 the uprising against Russian rule broke out here, and its defeat in 1831 cost the kingdom much of its autonomy.