Throughout its history Lviv has always been a large trade centre and, for some time, the most well-known Eastern European city in the entire Europe. There was only one city of Eastern Europe marked on the French geographical map of 1492, and it was Leopolis.
Lviv owes its exceptional trade mission to its geographical location at the optimal intersection point of roads leading from the East to the West and back. Outstanding merchant talents were cherished among the people of Lviv from the beginning of time. Almost every citizen of Lviv was a natural-born merchant genius. The people of Lviv were noted for their experience, wit, courage, energy, and incessant aspiration for enrichment. In the 14th-15th centuries merchants were mostly citizens of German and Armenian origin.
Traditionally, precious fabrics, carpets, valuable roots, spices and fruits were transported from the East to Europe through Lviv, while clothes, weapons, silver and gold jewellery, and leather found their way from the West to the East.
In 1379 Lviv obtained the so-called right of storage. It meant that all merchants who were not from Lviv and transported any goods from the East or West through Lviv were obliged to put their goods up for sale in the city for two weeks. What they hadn’t sold, they could carry further. Of course, the deft merchants of Lviv bought these goods up at dumping prices, thus becoming wealthier themselves and making the city wealthier, too. The Magistrate of Lviv did its best to assist it citizens. Only members of the city’s community had the right to freely purchase goods from visiting merchants and sell these goods at stores. Foreign merchants were forbidden to perform trade transactions between themselves under the threat of confiscation of their entire stock.
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