Lviv (Polish, Lwów; German, Lemberg; Russian, Lvov; Latin, Leopolis)

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LVIV (Polish, Lwów; German, Lemberg; Russian, Lvov; Latin, Leopolis)

LVIV (Polish, Lwów; German, Lemberg; Russian, Lvov; Latin, Leopolis). First mentioned in 1256, Lviv arose at the intersection of important trade routes linking the Baltic with the Black Sea and Cracow with Kiev. It was named for Leo, son of Daniel, prince of Galician-Volhynian Rus', who founded the city in the mid-thirteenth century. In 1349 the principality was incorporated into the Polish crown under Casimir III the Great. Lviv became the capital of the Ruthenian palatinate in 1434.

Casimir granted the city the Magdeburg law for municipal self-government in 1356, opening the door to considerable immigration, especially from German-speaking lands. Lviv was thus highly mixed from the beginnings of the Polish period. In addition to the autochthonous Ruthenians (ancestors of Ukrainians) there were numbers of Polish, German, Armenian, and Jewish immigrants. A Roman Catholic archbishopric was established in 1412, an Orthodox bishopric in 1539 (it received the Union of Brest with Rome in 1700), and an Armenian bishopric from 1626. The burghers were largely German until the beginning of the sixteenth century, from which point they and the Armenians underwent Polonization. Rights of citizenship in Lviv under the Magdeburg law applied only to Catholics. The Orthodox Ruthenian commonality found itself in social and confessional conflicts with the Polish or Polonized nobility, patriciate, and burghers.

Lviv was a cultural center. It was home to Catholic poets working in neo-Latin and Polish—Szymon Szymonowic (Simon Simonides, 1558–1629, son of the city councillor Szymon of Brzeziny) and the brothers Zimorowic, Szymon (c. 1609–1629) and Józef Bartłomiej (1597–1677), who served several times as Lviv's burgomaster—all of whom reflected local Ruthenian realia in their works. The Lviv Orthodox Dormition Brotherhood was an important Orthodox cultural center (its right of stauropegion, whereby it was placed directly under the patriarch's control and made independent of the local bishop, was granted by the patriarch of Antioch, Joachim V, in 1586). It established a school (1585) and printing house (first printing 1591), and it played an important role in the lives of local Ruthenians, serving also, with Vilnius, as an early center for a broader Orthodox revival in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries before yielding that role to Kiev in the 1630s. The city's first printing house was that of the Belarusian printer Ivan Fedorov, recently expelled from Moscow, who issued Lviv's first Church Slavonic book in 1574. Latin and Polish printings began to appear in 1581.

By the early seventeenth century, over five hundred craftsmen worked in some thirty guilds, among which producers of metalware, jewelry, and weapons enjoyed respect abroad. Lviv's artisans and architects joined western and eastern styles. Armenian artisans produced belts, caparisons, weapons, jewelry, and embroidery. Lviv's Jews and Armenians played important roles in trade between western Europe and the Orient and offered competition to the rest of Lviv's merchants and artisans.

The first Jews may have arrived from Byzantium, but the greatest immigration came after 1349 from Germany and Bohemia. The newcomers established two Ashkenazic settlements, an older, extramural congregation (in 1550, 559 Jews lived in 52 houses) and a newer, intramural congregation (352 Jews in 29 houses), with separate synagogues, mikva'ot, and charitable institutions, but one common cemetery.

Lviv declined together with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century. It was under frequent attack: by Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossack armies in 1648 and 1655 and by Turkish and Tatar forces in 1672, 1675, 1691, and 1695. The greatest depredations came at the hands of the Swedes in 1704 during the Great Northern War. Incorporated by the Habsburgs after the first partition of Poland in 1772, Lviv became the administrative capital of the Austrian Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.

See also Orthodoxy, Russian ; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795 ; Poland to 1569 ; Polish Literature and Language ; Ukraine .