ABSTRACT
Lviv (Polish: Lwów, German: Lemberg), founded in the mid-thirteenth century, soon became the main town in Galician Rus’ (Galicia, Ruthenia or, from the fifteenth century, Red Rus’).1 The whole region of Ruthenia, being influenced by migrations, frequent wars, long-distance trade and political expansion, was predestined to heterogeneity, so it is not by chance that the multi-religious (or multi-ethnic) character of the urban population is seen as a distinctive feature of Ruthenian towns.2 From the second half of the thirteenth century, the region was crossed by a trade route connecting the Black and Baltic Seas. The most important route originally ran through Wolodymyr in Wolhynia, but starting from the mid-fourteenth century it passed through Lviv. The trading centres were those places where the first foreign communities, formed predominantly by merchants, emerged.
