Prešov

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• Mukachevo

History

Habitation in the area around Prešov dates as far back as the Paleolithic period. The oldest discovered tools and mammoth bones are 28,000 years old. Continuous settlement dates back to the 8th century. After the Mongol invasion in 1241, King Béla IV of Hungary invited German colonists to fill the gaps in population. Prešov became a German-speaking settlement, related to the Zipser German and Carpathian German areas, In 1412, Prešov helped to create the Pentapolitana, the league of five towns, a trading group. The first record of a school dates from 1429. After the collapse of the old Kingdom of Hungary after the Ottoman invasion of 1526, Prešov became a border city and changed hands several times between two usually rivalrous domains, Habsburg Royal Hungary and Hungarian states normally backed by the Ottomans: the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom, the Principality of Transylvania, and the Principality of Upper Hungary. Still, Prešov went through an economic boom thanks to trade with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the 16th century, it brought in grape vines from the nearby Tokaj wine region, and was home to German-Hungarian, Polish, and Greek wine merchants. Some of the first books on Tokaj wine were written in German in Prešov. prelate, writer, diplomat and Archbishop of Esztergom, died in Prešov in 1573. Prešov was prominent in the Protestant Reformation. It was at the front line in the 1604–1606 Bocskai uprising, when Imperial Army commander Giorgio Basta retreated to the town after failing to take Košice from the Protestant rebels. In 1647, the Habsburgs designated it the capital of Sáros County. In late January 1657, Transylvanian Prince George II Rákóczi, a Protestant, invaded Poland with an army of some 25,000, which crossed the Carpathians on the road…