In 1430, Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas (великий князь литовський Вітовт) granted the rights over the area to Kalinik, the procurator (намісник) of Putyvl and Zvenyhorodka, and it is believed that his servant named Berdich founded a khutor (remote settlement) there.

In 1545, Berdyczów was mentioned as a property of the Polish-Lithuanian magnate Tyszkiewicz family, and in a 1546 document settling the border between Poland and Lithuania within the Polish–Lithuanian union.

It was granted city rights in 1593 and was a private town, administratively located in the Żytomierz County in the Kijów Voivodeship in the Lesser Poland Province.

[3] Berdyczów became a Catholic pilgrimage destination and an important defensive fortress on the eastern flank of Western Christian civilization.

In 1768, Kazimierz Pulaski defended the city with his 700 men surrounded by royal army during Bar Confederation.

The town underwent rapid development after king Stanisław August Poniatowski, under pressure from the powerful Radziwiłł family, granted it the unusual right to organize ten fairs a year.

[citation needed] According to the census of 1789, Jews constituted 75% of Berdychiv's population (1,951 out of 2,640, of whom 246 were liquor dealers, 452 houseowners, 134 merchants, 188 artisans, 150 clerks and 56 idlers).

In 1793, after the Second Partition of Poland and the annexation of Right-Bank Ukraine to the Russian Empire, Berdychiv became part of the Volyn Province as a town of Zhitomirsky Uyezd.

As the ideas of Haskalah influenced parts of the Jewish communities, a large group of Maskilim formed in Berdychiv in the 1820s.

The banking industry was moved from Berdychiv to Odessa (a major port city) after 1850, and the town became impoverished again in a short period of time.

In 1857, Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language, was born in Berdychiv.

As mayor he managed to prevent a planned multi-day pogrom in Berdychiv by haidamaks from the Kuren Smerti (Clan of Death)[clarification needed], thus saving thousands of lives.

On 26 April 1920, it was the site of a battle in which Poles defeated the Soviets and liberated the city during the Kyiv offensive and Polish–Soviet War.

[11] After another battle, on 7 June 1920, it was lost by the Poles to the Russian 1st Cavalry Army, which then carried out a massacre of hundreds of wounded Polish and Ukrainian soldiers plus Red Cross workers and nuns, who were burned alive in the local hospital.

[8] All remaining Jewish cultural and educational institutions were suspended in the second half of the 1930s, before the beginning of World War II.

An "extermination" German SS unit was established in Berdychiv in early July 1941 and a Jewish ghetto was set up.

As the perpetrators could not be found, 1,303 Jews, among them 875 Jewesses over 12 years, were executed by a unit of the Higher SS and Police Leaders".

He wrote a detailed description of the events for publication in The Black Book, edited by Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, which dealt with the German treatment of Soviet Jews in the Holocaust.

Originally meant for publication in the Soviet Union, it was banned there; one volume was eventually published in Bucharest in 1947.

[26] A detailed account of the massacre as told by the narrator's mother appears in a fictionalized context in Grossman's novel Life and Fate, which is widely available in an English translation by Robert Chandler.