This article is based on the author's own research into the medieval urban layout in Lesser Poland. The common feature of the five towns under investigation, all of them incorporated during the reign of Bolesław V the Chaste (1243-1279), is the dependence of their spatial plans on the layout of the Franciscan convent. Krakow of Prince Leszek I the White was in many ways similar to the Wrocław of Prince Henryk the Bearded (the dates of the earliest mention of the office of headman and of the arrival of the Dominicans and the Franciscans tollow closely upon one another in both towns). If the Krakow commune of c. 1220 was a territorial entity, and not just a legal construct, it may well have been founded on a street-band pattern (analogous to the Silesian model), the remnant of which can still be traced in the street-square axis of the Little Market Square and Stolarska Street, abutting on the moat round the house of the bailiff. Krakow of Bolesław the Chaste. This most regular urban plan of medieval Europe (1257) was the product of a vision that combined historical traditions and a sense of the town's role in the future. However, several elements of the actual layout are hard to interpret, ie. the funnel-shape opening of Grodzka Street (it could be a relic of an older arrangement or an irregularity which emerged perhaps from the destruction of the Tartar invasion of 1259-1260) or the dissymmetry of the two complexes of blocks of the Market Square's north-western corner, whose sides meet at an obtuse angle). The overall layout, divided by a cross formed by two intersecting pairs of streets, comprised nine rectangles with the market square in the middle. Each of the remaining eight rectangles (complexes) was divided, as a rule, into four blocks by two streets crossing in the centre. As the plots seem to have measured 72 x 36 Krakow ells (1 ell = 0.586 m), eight of them formed a square block (144 x 144 ells). In the 13th-14th century timber houses in the centre were gradually replaced by austere, stone architecture remarkably similar to that of Wroclaw; outside the core area the two redbrick mendicant complexes with their churches-necropolises of the Piasts-signalled the arrival of a new aesthetic. The incorporation of Zawichost (1241-1450) fixed an archaic street grid with a sack-shaped (triangular) square-street, surrounded by a wall. In 1255, not long after Zawichost's locatio a belt of plots was taken over by the Franciscan Minoresse.s (Poor Clares), among whose members was Prince Boleslaw’s sister Salomea (she died in the odour of sanctity and was later beatified). Nowe Miasto near Korczyn, an old settlement with a little fort, hac. in all likelihood received its incorporation charter earlier than Krakow. The fact thits parish church is dedicated to St Elizabeth may indicate a connection with Boleslaw's wife Kinga (Salomea's sister-in-law), while the choice of St Stanisław the Bishop for the patron of the local Franciscan church echoed his recent canonization (1253) in Assisi. The siting of the Franciscan complex, just outside the modular urban centre, followed the friars' tradition. The plan and programme of Nowe Miasto was typical of a middle-sized Małopolska town; its unit of measurement was the Rhenish 'cord' (or chorda, c. 47.10 m = 150 feet of c. 31.4 cm). Another variant of the feedback between the founding of a town and the siting of a convent can be observed at Skała, a small town incorporated in 1267 in the vicinity of the Poor Clares convent removed here from Zawichost in 1257-9. Allowing for the differences in scale the similarities with Krakow are hard to overlook; eg. the plots are of identical size (24 x 108 ells in Skała = 36 x 72 in Cracow). At the same time (1257-1273) Kinga (daughter of Bela IV, King of Hungary) used her influence to incorporate Sącz, today’s Stary (Old) Sącz. An analysis of the original layout of the town — whose parish church was dedicated to St Elizabeth of Hungary and Margaret, Kinga's close relations — reveals its dependence on the Hungarian model. At the centre of its triple-band structure was an elongated squarestreet with the church in the middle. Kinga expanded the plan of her town by founding a convent of the Poor Clares in 1280. This unusual configuration, at least by the Lesser Poland standards, did not last long. It was adapted, probably in the aftermath of the town’s re-incorporation under Magdeburg Law (1357-8), to the more regular chessboard pattern. The plans and architecture of towns founded and incorporated during the reign of Bolesław the Chaste bear a clear imprint of their age. It was a time when the ruling dynasties combined their political and utilitarian initiatives with a strong religious commitment, usually inspired by Franciscan models. This attitude and source of inspiration can be traced in the activities of the Piasts of the Lesser Poland, Silesia and Greater Poland, the Premyslids of Bohemia and the Arpads of Hungary, all of them connected by a dense web of consanguinity and intermarriage. Developments in every sphere of life-politics, the economy, social and cultural life, and religion-had their share in the creation of a comprehensive and harmonious world view of the High Middle Ages of Central Europe, an equivalent of Western Europe's union of Gothic architecture and scholasticism, a manifest expression of 'an enduring habit of mind' (as Panofsky called it). Whereas in Western Europe the desire to bring order into the world produced a perfectionist architecture and most intricate theological speculations, in Central Europe the 13th-century momentum seems to have manifested itself primarily in regular town-planning projects, rare in the West, but fairly common in this part of the continent.