History of Bacau

the presence of German colonists from the north. Originally the town focused around the Roman Catholic community that settled near a regular local market frequented by the population of the region on the lower reaches of the river.

The town was first mentioned in 1408 when Prince Alexander the Good of Moldavia (1400–1432) listed the customs points in the principality in his privilege for Polish merchants. (However, new research indicates that the first historical mention of the town is even earlier, occurring in a 1399 legal document of Prince Iuga of Moldavia, Alexander the Good's stepbrother). The customs house in the town is mentioned in Old Church Slavonic as krainee mîto ("the customs house by the edge") in the document which may indicate that it was the last customs stop before Moldavia's border with Wallachia. The town's name that features in Old Church Slavonic documents as Bako, Bakova or Bakovia comes most probably from a personal name. Men bearing the name Bakó are documented in Transylvania in the Middle Ages. The town may have been named after a Hungarian innkeeper who, supposedly, had an inn, the first building in the town, on the road from Bacău to Roman. Another theory suggests that the town's name has a Slavic origin, pointing to the Proto-Slavic word byk, meaning "ox" or "bull", the region being very suitable for raising cattle; the term, rendered into Romanian alphabet as bâc, was probably the origin of Bâcău.

An undated document reveals that the