Who ruled Berlin?

Berlin lies on the sandy, lake-strewn plain of north-eastern Germany, where the River Spree flows west to join the Havel. Nothing about the site was grand: it began as a pair of trading towns at a river crossing. Its importance came from the rulers who chose it, first the Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg, then the kings of Prussia and the emperors of Germany. In the twentieth century it was the capital of Hitler's Reich, a divided city on the front line of the Cold War, and finally the capital of a reunited country.

Slavic peoples settled the area from about the seventh century. In the twelfth century German lords pushed east, and the Margraviate of Brandenburg was established in 1157. Around 1200 German merchants founded two towns on either side of the Spree: Cölln, first mentioned in 1237, and Berlin, first mentioned in 1244. The towns joined the Hanseatic League and shared a common council from the early fourteenth century. In 1415 the Hohenzollern family received Brandenburg, and within a few decades they had broken the towns' independence, putting down a revolt in 1448 and building a palace on the Spree island that became their permanent residence.

The Thirty Years' War left the town plundered and about half its people gone. Recovery came under the Great Elector, Frederick William, who in 1685 invited Huguenot refugees from France; thousands settled in Berlin and gave it new crafts and a French-speaking elite. In 1701 his son crowned himself king in Prussia, and Berlin became the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1710 the twin towns and the newer suburbs were united as one royal capital. Under Frederick the Great, from 1740 to 1786, it became a city of barracks, palaces and the Enlightenment. The Brandenburg Gate was completed in 1791, and in 1806 Napoleon rode through it after defeating Prussia.

In the nineteenth century Berlin became an industrial city of railways, engineering and electrical firms. Barricades went up in the revolution of March 1848. When Prussia united Germany, Berlin was made capital of the new German Empire in 1871, and its population passed two million by 1910. The emperor abdicated in November 1918, and in 1920 the city absorbed its suburbs to form Greater Berlin, one of the largest cities in the world. During the 1920s it was a centre of modern art, theatre, film and science, but also of political street violence.

Nazi Germany made Berlin its seat of power from 1933. Jewish shops and synagogues were attacked in the pogrom of November 1938, and from 1941 the city's Jews were deported to ghettos and death camps. Allied bombing destroyed much of the centre, and the Soviet assault in April and May 1945 ended with Hitler's suicide and the city's surrender.

The victorious powers divided Berlin into four sectors. In 1948 the Soviet Union cut road and rail links to the western sectors, and for almost a year the Western Allies supplied them by air. From 1949 East Berlin was the capital of the German Democratic Republic, while West Berlin was tied to West Germany. A workers' uprising in East Berlin was crushed on 17 June 1953. To stop the flow of refugees, East Germany sealed the border on 13 August 1961 and built the Berlin Wall, which became the best-known symbol of the Cold War.

On 9 November 1989, amid the Revolutions of 1989, the border crossings were opened and crowds began to break down the Wall. Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990, and in 1991 parliament voted to move the seat of government from Bonn back to Berlin, a move completed in 1999. Berlin today has close to four million people and is Germany's largest city.