Who ruled Amsterdam?

Amsterdam grew where the little river Amstel met the IJ, an arm of the old Zuiderzee, in the waterlogged peat country of Holland. A dam across the river gave the town its name, and access to the sea gave it its living. In the seventeenth century it was the busiest port and the financial centre of Europe, and the ring of canals built in those years still shapes the city, the capital of the Netherlands.

The ground was too wet for lasting settlement until local farmers began draining and diking it around the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Roman rule, shown on the site's early maps, never in fact reached this far north of the Rhine frontier. The first written mention of Amestelledamme comes in a toll exemption granted by Count Floris V of Holland on 27 October 1275, and the town received city rights in about 1300 or 1306. As part of the county of Holland it lay within the Holy Roman Empire. A reported eucharistic miracle in 1345 made it a place of pilgrimage, and by the fifteenth century it was Holland's main trading town, shipping grain from the Baltic to the rest of the Low Countries. Fires in 1421 and 1452 destroyed much of the wooden town, after which building in brick was encouraged. Through inheritance, Holland passed to the dukes of Burgundy and then to the Habsburgs, and from 1555 to the Spanish king Philip II.

When the Dutch Revolt broke out, Amsterdam at first stayed loyal to Spain and Catholicism, but in 1578 a bloodless change of government, the Alteratie, brought it over to the rebels. The Spanish capture of Antwerp in 1585 sent merchants, craftsmen and capital north, and Amsterdam rose with remarkable speed. It became the leading city of the Dutch Republic and the headquarters of the world's first great joint-stock trading companies: the East India Company of 1602 had its main chamber here, a stock exchange opened in 1611, and the Bank of Amsterdam in 1609. From 1613 the city expanded in planned stages along three new concentric canals lined with merchants' houses.

Religious tolerance, by the standards of the day, drew Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain, Huguenots from France and dissenters of every kind, and the city became a centre of printing and free thought. Rembrandt worked here, and Baruch Spinoza was born into the city's Portuguese Jewish community. By the 1660s Amsterdam had about 200,000 people, though plague in the 1660s killed more than a tenth of them.

The eighteenth century brought relative decline as Britain overtook the Republic. French armies arrived in 1795, creating the Batavian Republic, and Napoleon later made his brother Louis king of Holland before annexing the country to France in 1810. The occupation and the British blockade ruined the port. After French troops left in 1813 the city became the constitutional capital of the new kingdom, though government sat in The Hague. Revival came with the opening of the North Sea Canal in 1876, new industries and fast-growing working-class districts beyond the old canal ring.

German forces occupied Amsterdam from May 1940 to May 1945. In February 1941 workers staged a general strike against the persecution of Jews, a rare open protest in occupied Europe, but the deportations went on, and most of the city's roughly 80,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Anne Frank wrote her diary while hiding in a canal house on the Prinsengracht. The Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945 killed thousands more.

After the war the city became known for its radical youth movements, squatters and liberal social policies, while the port and the financial sector kept its economy strong. Amsterdam today has more than 900,000 inhabitants and remains the country's largest city.