Suceava is the largest city and the seat of Suceava County, situated in the historical region of Bukovina, north-eastern Romania, and at the crossroads of Central and Eastern Europe. During the late Middle Ages, from 1388 to 1564, the city was the capital of the Principality of Moldavia.
From 1775 to 1918, Suceava was controlled by the Habsburg Monarchy, initially part of its Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then gradually becoming the third most populous urban settlement of the Duchy of Bukovina, a constituent land of the Austrian Empire and subsequently a crown land within the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary. During this time, Suceava was an important, strategically-located commercial border town with the then Romanian Old Kingdom.
In the wake of World War I, after 1918, along with the rest of Bukovina, Suceava became part of the then newly enlarged Kingdom of Romania. After the end of World War II, the city slowly underwent a process of communist urbanization which increased its population about tenfold throughout the decades before the 1989 Romanian Revolution. It became a municipality in 1968.