The 16th CENTURY

Population – 6,000-7,000
Artisans – every fourth resident
Crafts - 56
Homeowners - 1,091
Homesteads – 1,166
Streets - 26

The year of 1500 was off to a difficult start for Berestye. The 15,000-strong army of Crimean Tatars of Khan Mengli Giray raided and destroyed the town. The Tartars did not conquer the castle and retreated after receiving a large payment from its residents.

Berestye got back to its feet quickly. Berestye residents were exempted from taxes on beer, honey, and wax trade. The town received duties from grain import, a part of revenues of each shop and tavern. The town hall was funded by the bathhouse and wax refinery.

Berestye merchants strengthened trade ties with Belarusian towns: Slutsk, Mensk, Mogilev, and also with a number of Ukrainian, Polish and Lithuanian towns. Berestye was used as a transit point to transport paper, tin, ironware, salt, and spices from the West, and crude furskin, leather, wax, forged belts, etc from the East. The town hosted two-week international fairs three times a year.

The town was growing rich. The Berestye customs was second in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in terms of revenues to the state treasury. Two or three-storied wooden houses became a common sight across the city. A striking clock was installed on one of the castle towers, and a bell - on the other.

The town defense issues were repeatedly discussed at the public and political meetings in Berestye. In 1513 the Sejm approved the military statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, according to which Berestye was obliged to deploy 150 mounted soldiers in case of war and to pay 3,000 coins to the state treasury.

In 1520 Berestye became a center of a district in Podlaskie Voivodeship. A great fire in 1525 destroyed the castle and the administrative center of the city. After that there was a ban on building wooden houses above two storeys, and the residents who suffered from the disaster were exempted from all taxes and duties for 10 years.

The Reformation movement, Calvinism, aimed at renewing Catholicism was widespread in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 16th century. In 1550 head of the Calvinists of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Nicholas Radziwill the Black was appointed head of Berestye. He initiated and funded the construction of the first Calvinist cathedral and printing house in the Belarusian lands in 1553.

Berestye printing house (1553-1570)

The printing house published over 40 religious, historical, law and polemical books in Polish and Latin. Berestye books were known for their refined and high-quality design: they widely used Renaissance graphics, type ornament, headpieces, tailpieces, xylography and Gothic type.

Song art held a special place in the history of the Berestye book printing. A collection of Yan Zaremba's songs was published in 1558. Later, collections-canons of folk tunes came out. They were published with direct participation of Cyprian Bazylik, a famous educator, translator, poet and musician, one of the followers of Francysk Skaryna. It was under his leadership that the printing house saw its peak development.

In 1563 the world’s famous Brest (Radziwill) Bible, a complete text of Holy Scripture in the Polish literary language of the 16th century, was printed in the Berestye printing house on the initiative of and with the financing of Nicholas Radziwill the Black in order to spread the Reformation ideas. The Bible became one of the most complete and perfect editions of its time in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It had 738 pages and 14 engravings, and featured masterfully made headpieces, vignettes, and decorative initials. Commentaries to the text were placed on the margins of the pages. The Flood, The Knees of Israel, and The Fountain engravings are recognized as masterpieces of Belarusian graphics today.

The first page of the Bible depicted the coat of arms of the Radziwill family. Then there were dedications to King and Grand Duke Sigismund Augustus, a preface, texts of the Old and New Testaments, and a calendar of readings. The Brest Bible was the first book in the history of Belarusian printing to include a subject index.

The surviving copies or fragments of this rare edition are regarded as the sources of pride of libraries and archives in Minsk, Vilnius, Krakow, Moscow, and St. Petersburg…

Later, the Berestye printing house published Psalter and the anti-Catholic program Proteus. The anonymous Conversation of a Pole with a Lithuanian raised important social and political issues of the Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ahead of the signing of the Union of Lublin.

The Berestye printing house closed in 1570. The Berestye editions are a great rarity. The few copies that have survived to this day attest to the paramount importance which the Berestye printing house played in the history of printing in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Berestye Voivodship was set up in 1566 to include Berestye district.

The town gradually expanded its borders. In 1566 it consisted of three main parts: the castle (on the site of the citadel of the ancient Berestye), “mesto” - the main town area (on an island formed by the Western Bug River and the arms of the Mukhavets River), and “Zamukhavechye” (the area on the right bank of the Mukhavets River). The magistrate, court, market square, churches and monasteries, houses of wealthy residents were located in the castle part of the town. The “mesto” and the castle were connected by a bridge. A trumpeter played a song on the castle tower every day at dawn.

By that time Berestye became home to bricklayers, printers, healers, goldsmiths, gunsmiths, tinsmiths, glassblowers, needle-makers, hat-makers, architects, painters, and even skomorokhs.

Following the death of Nicholas Radziwill The Black, Ostafi (Eustachy) Bohdanowicz Wołłowicz  was elected the head of Berestye. It was a prominent statesman and public figure of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a humanist, philanthropist and educationalist, one of the authors of the second edition of the Statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania of 1566, a code of fundamental laws.

The Union of Lublin of 1569 united the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland into a federal state - Rzeczpospolita. During this period, documents often referred to Berestye as Brest Litovsky, along with its old name. In 1588 Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Leu Sapieha developed the third edition of the Statute in the Belarusian language, which secured the autonomous political and legal status of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania within Rzeczpospolita.

The Union of Lublin contributed to the revival of Catholicism. Catholic monastic orders of Augustinians, Basilians, Brigitans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Trinitarians and others became widely spread in Berestye with the support of the heads of the church, state and town. All of them received vast plots of land, built churches and monasteries, and opened schools.

The local population was displeased with the spread of Catholicism. They started forming brotherhoods – voluntary religious and cultural associations with the aim to preserve the Belarusian culture and language under the Orthodox churches and monasteries.

In 1591 an Orthodox brotherhood was founded at St. Nicholas Church to include local residents of different social background. A brotherhood school was opened at the church, and well-known teacher Lavrentiy Zizaniy Tustanovsky from Lvov came here to work in 1592. In Berestye he prepared the ABC Book, the first primer in Belarus and Ukraine. It consisted of the alphabet, two-letter and three-letter syllables, prayers for reading, interpretation of prayers, and the Lexis, an explanatory dictionary.

Education in brotherhood schools was democratic. They educated boys of all social strata. The brotherhood school taught theology, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, dialectics, rhetoric, astronomy and music, Slavic, Belarusian, Greek, Latin and Polish. The school paid much attention to moral education. Unlike most educational institutions in Europe, there was virtually no birching in the Brest brotherhood school.