Who ruled Antananarivo?

Antananarivo is built on a long granite ridge and the hills around it in the central highlands of Madagascar, about 1,280 metres above sea level. Below the ridge spread the marshy plains of the Ikopa river, which its people turned into rice fields that could feed a dense population. The city's history is that of the Merina people: their kings made the hilltop their fortress and capital, unified most of the island from it in the nineteenth century, and left it as the capital of the French colony and then of the independent state.

Madagascar was settled late, by seafarers from island South-East Asia who arrived over the first millennium CE and were later joined by people from East Africa. Highland communities often described as the Vazimba lived around the hill, then called Analamanga, "blue forest". In the early seventeenth century, around 1610 or 1625 according to differing traditions, the Merina king Andrianjaka drove them out and built a fortified royal compound, the rova, on the summit. A later king, Andriamasinavalona, gave the town its present name, usually translated "city of the thousand", after the warriors said to have guarded it. The maps show a Merina kingdom here from much earlier, but the highland state in fact took shape only in the sixteenth century.

After Andriamasinavalona's death in about 1710 the kingdom split among his sons, and decades of war followed. Andrianampoinimerina, ruler of the rival town of Ambohimanga, captured Antananarivo in 1793 and in 1794 restored it as the capital of a reunited Merina Kingdom. He laid out the great market at Analakely. His son Radama I, king from 1810, extended Merina rule over most of the island and was recognised by Britain as king of Madagascar. He welcomed missionaries of the London Missionary Society, who arrived in 1820, opened schools and set down the Malagasy language in Latin letters.

Queen Ranavalona I, who reigned from 1828 to 1861, expelled the missionaries and persecuted Malagasy Christians, some of whom were executed on the cliffs of the city. She also employed the French craftsman Jean Laborde to build the queen's palace, Manjakamiadana, in wood. Under her successors, guided by the long-serving prime minister Rainilaiarivony, the court converted to Christianity in 1869. A decree of 1867 allowed houses to be built of brick and stone, which had been reserved for tombs, and the city soon filled with churches and two-storey brick houses with verandas in a distinctive highland style.

French troops took the city in September 1895 after shells struck the royal compound. Madagascar became a French colony in 1896, and in 1897 the last queen, Ranavalona III, was sent into exile and the monarchy abolished. As Tananarive, the city gained a colonial administrative quarter, tunnels through the ridge, and a railway to the east coast. Madagascar regained independence in 1960 with Antananarivo as capital.

Since then the city has been the stage for the country's political upheavals: mass protests in its streets forced changes of government in 1972, 2002, 2009 and 2025, and shook the regime in 1991. In November 1995 a fire destroyed most of the buildings of the rova, including the queen's palace; its stone shell has since been largely restored. Antananarivo today is Madagascar's largest city, with an urban area of several million people, and its political and economic centre.