Who ruled Lviv?

Lviv lies in the hills of western Ukraine, on the watershed between rivers flowing to the Baltic and to the Black Sea, and on the old trade route from Poland and Germany towards the Black Sea ports and the Ottoman lands. Known in Polish as Lwów, in German as Lemberg and in Latin as Leopolis, it has belonged to Galicia-Volhynia, Poland, Austria, the Soviet Union and Ukraine. For six centuries it was a city of many peoples, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and Armenians living side by side, until the wars and deportations of the 1940s destroyed that mixture.

Lviv was founded in the mid-thirteenth century by Daniel of Galicia, ruler of a principality that had emerged from Kievan Rus, and named after his son Lev. It first appears in a chronicle entry for 1256, at a time when the princes of Galicia-Volhynia acknowledged the overlordship of the Golden Horde. After the native dynasty died out, King Casimir III of Poland took the city in 1340 and secured the region by 1349. In 1356 he granted it Magdeburg law, and a new walled town was laid out around a central market square.

Under Polish and later Polish-Lithuanian rule Lviv prospered as a staple town on the trade in eastern goods. Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian archbishops all had their cathedrals there, and the Jewish community was among the most important in the kingdom. Catholics enjoyed full civic rights while Orthodox Ruthenians, the ancestors of modern Ukrainians, faced restrictions. The city resisted repeated sieges: by the Cossacks of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648 and 1655, who were bought off with ransoms, and by an Ottoman army in 1672. Swedish troops finally stormed and plundered it in 1704.

In the First Partition of Poland in 1772 the city passed to the Habsburg Monarchy and, as Lemberg, became the capital of the province of Galicia. Austrian bombardment ended the revolutionary movement there in November 1848. After Galicia won autonomy in the 1860s, Polish became the language of administration and the university, but Lviv was also the main centre of the Ukrainian national movement, with its own societies, newspapers and churches.

When Austria-Hungary collapsed in November 1918, Ukrainians proclaimed the West Ukrainian People's Republic with Lviv as its capital, and fighting broke out in the streets with the city's largely Polish population. Polish forces won, and between the wars Lwów was one of the largest cities of Poland. In September 1939 the Red Army occupied it under the Nazi-Soviet pact, and thousands of residents were arrested or deported. German forces arrived in June 1941. The city's Jewish population, more than 100,000 people swollen by refugees, was confined to a ghetto and almost entirely murdered in the Holocaust, many of them at the Janowska camp on the outskirts and at the Belzec death camp.

The Red Army returned in July 1944, and the city was annexed to the Ukrainian republic of the Soviet Union. Almost all of the surviving Polish population was resettled to Poland, and Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside and Russians took their place. Lviv became a stronghold of Ukrainian national feeling, and it played a leading part in the movement that brought Ukrainian independence in 1991. Its old town was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 it has sheltered large numbers of people displaced from the east and has itself been struck by missile attacks. With about 700,000 inhabitants, Lviv is the largest city in western Ukraine.