Zagreb

Zagreb grew as two neighbouring towns on the southern slopes of Medvednica, divided by the Medveščak stream: Kaptol, the cathedral and bishop's seat founded in 1094, and Gradec, the walled merchant town on the next hill. After the Mongols ravaged both in 1242, King Béla IV, sheltered by the townsmen of Gradec, gave them a Golden Bull that made it a free royal town with its own courts. Disputes over rents, markets and property kept the two communities at odds for centuries, and the bishops of Kaptol twice excommunicated the people of Gradec.

As the Ottomans closed in, Kaptol replaced its old wooden palisades with walls and towers, built in 1469–73 and again in 1512–20; the Prislin Tower is one of those that survive. In 1557 Zagreb became the capital of the shrunken Croatian kingdom, and the Sabor first met at Gradec. Ottoman forces came as far as Sisak in 1593 but were beaten there. The ban made the city his seat in 1621, and the Jesuits built St Catherine's church in 1620–32 and opened an academy in 1669, the forerunner of the university. Fire and plague ravaged the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in 1776 the royal council moved from Varaždin to Zagreb, and in 1835 Ljudevit Gaj began the Illyrian newspapers here.