Wrocław

Wrocław, called Breslau by its German merchants, spreads across the islands and channels of the Oder, with the cathedral on its island and a market square lined with merchants' houses around the town hall. The last independent duke of the Wrocław line, Henry VI the Good, died in 1335, and the duchy passed to the Bohemian crown; in 1348 Charles IV bound it firmly to the Lands of the Bohemian Crown.

Breslau grew rich as a staple town on the trade routes between Poland, Bohemia and the Baltic, and belonged to the Hanseatic League for almost a century until 1474. Matthias Corvinus ruled it from 1469 to 1490. The Reformation reached the city in 1518, and from 1526 the Catholic Habsburgs ruled Silesia. Breslau backed the Bohemian Revolt in 1618, was occupied in the Thirty Years' War, and lost thousands to plague. The Habsburgs brought Jesuits and other orders to rebuild its Catholic life, while the Protestant city's records of births and deaths supplied Edmond Halley with the data for his 1693 life tables. Prussia took Breslau in 1741–42.