Who ruled Belgrade?

Belgrade stands on a ridge above the point where the Sava flows into the Danube, at the edge of the Pannonian plain and the gateway to the Balkan valleys leading south. The fortress on that ridge, now Kalemegdan park, guarded one of the great crossings between central Europe and the Balkans, and as a result Belgrade was besieged, captured and destroyed more often than almost any city in Europe. It is the capital of Serbia, and for most of the twentieth century it was the capital of Yugoslavia.

The area was home to some of Europe's most advanced Neolithic farmers: the Vinča culture, named after a site just downstream, flourished in the sixth and fifth millennia BCE. In the third century BCE the Scordisci, a tribe of Celts, fortified the ridge and gave it the name Singidun. The Romans made it Singidunum, a legionary fortress on the Danube frontier, and the emperor Jovian was born there in the fourth century. The Hunnic Empire destroyed the town in 441; Justinian rebuilt it in the sixth century, but Avars and Slavs overran it soon after.

The Slavic name Beograd, "white city", first appears in a papal letter of 878, when the town belonged to the Bulgarian state. For the next four centuries it passed among Bulgarians, Byzantines and Hungarians. In 1284 the Hungarian king gave it to the Serbian king Stefan Dragutin, and in the early fifteenth century the despot Stefan Lazarević made it the capital of Serbia and rebuilt its walls. On his death in 1427 the city reverted to Hungary.

As the Ottomans advanced, Belgrade became the key to Hungary. In 1456 Mehmed II, three years after taking Constantinople, besieged it with a huge army and was driven off by John Hunyadi, a victory celebrated across Catholic Europe. Suleiman the Magnificent finally took it in 1521, opening the way to his victory at Mohács. Under Ottoman rule it became a large and prosperous trading city with many mosques. The armies of the Habsburg Monarchy captured it three times, in 1688, 1717 and 1789, but each time it returned to Ottoman rule, by reconquest or by treaty, and the sieges left little of the old town standing.

Serbian rebels seized Belgrade in 1806 during the First Serbian Uprising, and after a second uprising Serbia became an autonomous principality. Belgrade became its capital in 1841, though an Ottoman garrison stayed in the fortress until 1867. Over the following decades most of its Ottoman buildings gave way to a European-style capital of boulevards and public institutions. In World War I Austro-Hungarian guns shelled it from across the river from the first days of the war, and German and Austro-Hungarian forces captured it in October 1915. Serbian and French troops freed it in November 1918, and it was made the seat of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia.

On 6 April 1941 German bombers struck the city without warning, killing thousands, and during the occupation that followed nearly all of Belgrade's Jews were murdered. Yugoslav Partisans and the Red Army liberated it in October 1944. Under Josip Broz Tito Belgrade grew rapidly, with the planned district of New Belgrade built on the marshes across the Sava, and in 1961 it hosted the first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s brought sanctions and isolation. NATO aircraft bombed targets in the city in 1999 during the Kosovo war, and in October 2000 mass protests in Belgrade forced Slobodan Milošević from power. The city has about 1.7 million people and is the largest in the former Yugoslavia.