Yaroslavl

Yaroslavl stands on the high bank of the Volga where the Kotorosl joins it. A principality of its own, it reached its peak under Fyodor the Black, who married a daughter of a Horde khan and played a large part in the politics of the Upper Volga. From the second half of the fourteenth century the principality was divided into ever smaller appanages, its princes lost weight in Russian politics, and its levies fought at Kulikovo in 1380. Moscow annexed it in 1463. Ivan III's builders then replaced the burned cathedrals of the Spassky Monastery with new churches, and after a fire in 1536 the town was ringed with towers and an earthen rampart.

In 1609 Yaroslavl defeated False Dmitry II's troops with a militia from Vologda, and withstood a second siege. In 1612 Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky gathered the second national militia here before it marched on Moscow, and the city served for months as Russia's seat of government. In the seventeenth century it was one of the country's largest cities and a Volga trading port. Fyodor Volkov founded Russia's first public theatre here in 1750. In 1777 Yaroslavl became the seat of a governorate, and in 1786 the Rostov bishopric moved here from Rostov.