Who ruled Baku?

Baku curves around a sheltered bay on the southern side of the Absheron Peninsula, which juts into the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan. The peninsula is windswept and dry, but its ground seeps oil and gas, which burned in natural flames visible for miles. For most of its history Baku was a fortified port in the shadow of larger capitals; at the end of the nineteenth century those oil seeps made it the world's leading oil producer and a boom town that grew faster than almost any other in the Russian Empire.

The Absheron was inhabited long before the town. Rock carvings at nearby Gobustan go back many thousands of years, and the same site preserves a Latin inscription left by a Roman legion in the late first century CE. In late antiquity the area lay within the Sasanian Empire, whose religion of Zoroastrianism honoured fire, and the region's burning ground has long been linked with fire worship; the surviving Ateshgah temple, though, was built by Indian merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Arab armies brought Islam in the seventh century.

From the ninth century Baku belonged to the Shirvanshahs, rulers of the region of Shirvan. After an earthquake struck their capital Shamakhi in 1191, the court moved to Baku for a time, and the town walls and the enigmatic Maiden Tower took on much of their present form in this period. The Mongols overran the region in the thirteenth century. The Shirvanshahs, now vassals of larger powers, built their palace in the old town in the fifteenth century. In 1501 the Safavid shah Ismail I besieged and took Baku, and in 1538 Shirvan was absorbed into the Safavid Empire. The Ottoman Empire held the city for a quarter of a century from 1578. Merchants already shipped oil from hand-dug pits, and Marco Polo had heard of it in the thirteenth century.

When Safavid power collapsed, Peter the Great sent troops across the Caspian, and Baku surrendered to Russia in 1723. Russia handed it back to Persia in 1735, and from 1747 it was the seat of the small Baku Khanate. Russian forces took the city for good in 1806.

Under the Russian Empire Baku became an industrial city. One of the first modern oil wells was drilled at Bibi-Heybat in 1846, and after the state monopoly on oil lands was lifted in 1872 investors poured in, among them the Nobel brothers and the Rothschilds. By 1900 the Baku fields produced about half of the world's oil. The town's population grew from a few thousand to more than 200,000, and oil barons built mansions, theatres and a seafront boulevard beside the walled old town, while workers crowded into the industrial district known as the Black City.

The boom also brought ethnic and social strife. Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought in 1905, and in 1918 the city saw massacres of Muslims in March and of Armenians in September, when Ottoman and Azerbaijani forces captured it. Baku then became the capital of the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic until the Red Army arrived in April 1920. As the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan it supplied much of the Soviet Union's oil, which made it a principal objective of the German offensive in the Caucasus in 1942, though German troops never reached it.

On 20 January 1990 Soviet troops entered the city to crush the national movement, killing more than a hundred civilians in what Azerbaijanis call Black January. Independence followed in 1991. Offshore oil and gas deals from 1994 and a pipeline to the Mediterranean, opened in the mid-2000s, funded a wave of new building. The walled old city has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. Baku has more than two million people and is the largest city on the Caspian Sea.