Crime and justice in medieval Lviv played an important role in the townspeople's public life and served as a topic of constant interest for the inhabitants. The wealthy trading city of Lviv attracted not only foreign merchants and artisans but also criminals of all kinds. However, the criminal world of medieval Lviv, which had its regional peculiarities, was characterized by hostility to unmotivated cruelty. Serious criminal crimes were rather the exception to the rule, and they were mainly committed by representatives of the nobility and outsiders. The most common offenses were fraud, counterfeiting coins and various goods, gambling, hooliganism, thefts, and prostitution. The crime rate increased during periods of wars, economic crises, and political instability, which were usually accompanied by social unrest and a decline in morals.

The Lviv magistrate consisted of the city council (rada or rada) and the city court (lava), which dealt mainly with criminal cases. Although the council was an administrative body, the vagueness of the legislation often led to its functions overlapping with those of the court. Members of the city council (rajcy or consuls) exercised police supervision, distributed city lands, leased city property and its profitable spheres of activity, set taxes, admitted to city rights (citizenship), and resolved disputes that did not require the involvement of witnesses. In addition, the burgomaster (burgomaster or proconsul) and rajcy fought against gambling, monitored traders to ensure they did not deceive or shortchange buyers, and prices to prevent profiteering by resellers. Rajcy did not receive money for their work, which was considered honorable, but they did not pay royal and city taxes on their real estate, were exempt from a number of duties, and received various gifts. Burgomasters had the right to independently administer justice and resolve disputes, even at their own homes, and through them, petitions and appeals were submitted to the royal chancellery.

Crime

The legislation of the 14th–16th centuries distinguished crimes committed against the magistrate and the Church (blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft), against the life and health of citizens (murder, robbery, infliction of bodily harm), against public morals (prostitution, sodomy, rape, and bigamy). The most common in medieval Lviv were property crimes (thefts, robberies, frauds, and non-repayment of debts), followed by crimes against faith. Priests explained the appearance of famine, epidemics, and venereal diseases by blasphemy, severely punishing the guilty, up to burning at the stake. According to statistics, thefts of sacred objects from churches were mainly committed by men, while witchcraft was committed by women (herbalism and fortune-telling, which had no negative consequences, were not considered offenses at all).

Serious crimes (murders and armed robberies) were a relatively rare phenomenon in medieval Lviv. Laws distinguished murder in self-defense and accidental murder (or manslaughter). A crime against public peace and city authority was considered the murder of a guard while performing his duties or murder with a mercenary motive. It was not uncommon for mothers, due to poverty, shame, fear of parental punishment, or fear of losing their job, to kill their newborn children (mainly unmarried women and maidservants). Abortion was also considered murder. In addition, attempting to terminate a pregnancy using harmful products and drinks, and leaving an infant unattended were considered crimes.

The concept of sexual crimes was interpreted very broadly in medieval law. For example, the term "sodomy" combined masturbation, homosexuality, lesbianism, bestiality, necrophilia, sexual contacts "in an unnatural way," and sexual contacts between Christians and non-Christians. According to the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, those found guilty of the "sodomite sin" were to be burned at the stake. In 1518, a widowed Armenian and an unmarried Catholic woman were burned in Lviv for interconfessional sexual relations. Marital infidelities often ended in court cases where compensation for moral damages was demanded from lovers.

In Lviv, livestock and horses were often stolen, with which merchants arrived in the city; petty thefts committed by servants in their masters' homes were common. Theft cases increased during epidemics when the homes of wealthy citizens were left unattended. Court archives contain cases of looting rich Jewish graves. Armed gangs robbed merchant caravans and lone travelers on the roads leading to Lviv, less often in the suburbs, sometimes attacking suburban villages and outlying estates of the nobility. There were Jewish gangs in the Krakow suburb, many gangs were created by Polish nobles or former soldiers.

Street hooliganism and murders in fights were common in medieval Lviv, usually committed in a state of severe alcohol intoxication. Fights between servants of different lords, between burghers and nobility, between garrison soldiers and city guards, fights over debts, gambling, women, and even fights involving priests were not uncommon. In 1537, Greta Kokhnova and her daughter Małgorzata severely beat the rector of the Lviv cathedral school, master of jurisprudence Jan Tucholczyk (moreover, the women, thanks to lawyer Mateusz Kaszer, even won the court case where Tucholczyk demanded three thousand Hungarian gold coins from them as compensation). In 1578, on Rynok Square in the presence of King Stephen Báthory himself, field clerk Wacław Wąsowicz and rotmistrz Temruk fought. In 1580, at the Anna Łącka's wedding, representatives of two famous and respected Lviv families fought: Urban Ubaldini and Paweł Jeleonek.

At the end of the 16th–beginning of the 17th century, the criminal situation in Lviv got worse. The city and suburbs were flooded with adventurers and mercenaries gathering here into detachments for campaigns to the Tsardom of Russia, Wallachia, and the northern borders of the Ottoman Empire. Often, after revelries, mercenaries committed rapes, robberies, and even murders.

There were many abuses in the profitable alcohol trade. Unscrupulous tavern keepers diluted and short-poured beer, mead, and wine; some merchants smuggled cheap beer from the suburbs and expensive Hungarian wines into the city (brewing beer was allowed only within the city walls, and the transportation of imported wine was a monopoly of the magistrate). Many tavern owners mixed high-quality Hungarian wines with cheaper varieties from Wallachia and used special containers that held less drink than the norm. To combat this, the position of controller was established in Lviv, who monitored the volume of barrels, bottles, and mugs, fining violators. As claimed by Polish ethnographer and medieval historian Jan Stanisław Bystron, drunkenness was extremely widespread in Polish cities. To prevent the use of furniture in drunken fights, benches in taverns were made very massive and heavy.

Riots on religious grounds were most often directed against the Jewish community of Lviv. However, open attacks on the Jewish quarter almost did not occur during the High Middle Ages, but began only in the Late Middle Ages – in 1572 and 1592 (Jewish pogroms, known in Lviv as tumults, became even more frequent in the 17th–18th centuries). The main instigators of the pogroms were students of the cathedral school. Jews were forced to buy off the rioting Catholic youth, giving both money and goods. Lviv Jews who were tavern keepers and moneylenders suffered the most, having a bad reputation due to the peculiarities of their professions.

During the princely period of Lviv's history, many sorcerers, soothsayers, and fortune-tellers lived in the city. In the Krakow suburb lived the Armenian warlock and master of alchemy Dmitry, known far beyond the city. People even came from Western Europe to study with him. Information has been preserved about the visit to Lviv by the Prague alchemist Bartholomew and the German warlock Leonard, who asked Dmitry to share with them the secret of obtaining the "philosopher's stone". Dmitry kept his knowledge secret but gave the guests a letter of recommendation to a certain "Greek school" located near Tabriz.

Many Lviv alchemists engaged in apothecary business, selling their clients not only medicines but also sugar, spices, "protective" amulets, and "miraculous" potions. Another popular group was astrologers, magicians, mystics, and other esoterics, among whom foreigners predominated. But the time of their triumph came after the end of the Middle Ages (in the 16th century, the Maltese Friedrich Joachim Megelino shone in Lviv, in the 18th century the city was visited by the famous Alessandro Cagliostro).

Prostitution In medieval Lviv, prostitution, although considered a crime and ungodly activity, existed almost legally. Visiting a brothel and trading one's body were immoral phenomena but were not actually punished (some Lviv guilds prescribed in their charters a ban on visiting the "house of debauchery" for members of the association). Already at the beginning of the 15th century, some Lviv prostitutes went to work in Kraków and other Polish cities.

The first mention of a Lviv brothel (lupanar) dates back to 1450. In archival documents, there is a record of repairing the water supply in the city brothel, for which 12 groszes were allocated. Another brothel opened in 1473 in the Jewish quarter, on the site of the current ruins of the Golden Rose synagogue. According to archival records, the owner of the brothel was presumably the merchant from Bergamo Rusetto, who lived for a long time in Kaffa and was engaged in slave trade. He transported caravans of slaves through Lviv several times, mainly from Abkhazia, Mingrelia, and the Balkans. Another well-known slave trader was also an Italian, Giannetto Lomellino from Genoa, who in 1474 bought a batch of women from Rusetto and received special permission to export the slaves from the city.

In the 16th century, a popular lupanar was located near the city arsenal, opposite the horse mill. Previously, it was a rural tavern, which was bought with magistrate funds, dismantled, transported to Lviv, and reassembled here. The building burned down during the fire of 1571, but a detailed description of it has been preserved (around the main room were six "working" rooms, the brothel had two exits to reduce the likelihood of guests meeting each other). After the fire, the "merry house" temporarily moved to the tower of the Ribbon Makers and Turners at the arsenal, and then was located in the house of Yuri Wojnar (modern house No. 2 on Ruska Street).

The Krakow suburb was also famous for brothels, where the main clients were visiting merchants and employees of the Low Castle (the fame of the local lupanars, but already in the 17th century, was written about in one of his poems by the famous Polish poet Jan Andrzej Morsztyn).

Gambling

From the mid-14th century in the Kingdom of Poland, including in Galicia, the game of dice began to gain popularity. In 1387, the Lviv magistrate issued a special order prohibiting dice games for money within the city walls. If detected, violators were fined 48 groszes, and all players had to return the won amounts to each other. Tavern keepers in whose drinking establishments the game was conducted were punished even more severely: after two warnings, the magistrate took away their trading rights and closed the tavern. Despite prohibitions and moral condemnation, dice remained a common entertainment among soldiers and the city lower classes throughout the Middle Ages.