Zbarazh

Zbarazh lies in southern Volhynia, where the castle of the Zbaraski and Wiśniowiecki princes overlooks the town. Built with bastions in the early seventeenth century, the fortress became famous for a siege that tested the armies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against the Cossack uprising. The town and castle stood in a region frequently exposed to raids from the steppe.

In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky's forces captured Zbarazh. The following summer a Polish army, with Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki among its leaders, held an entrenched camp by the castle against Cossack and Crimean Tatar forces. The long siege ended after the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Zboriv in 1649. The town remained a private noble possession and passed to Austria in the first partition of Poland in 1772.