Who ruled Bratislava?

Bratislava lies on the Danube where the river breaks through the last spurs of the Little Carpathians, a natural gateway between the Vienna basin and the Hungarian plain. It is the only national capital that borders two other countries, Austria and Hungary. For most of its history it was not a Slovak city in name or language: as Pressburg to German speakers and Pozsony to Hungarians, it served for nearly three centuries as the capital and coronation town of the Kingdom of Hungary, before becoming Bratislava in 1919.

Celts of the Boii people built a fortified settlement here in the last centuries BCE and struck silver coins carrying names such as Biatec. The Danube then became the frontier of the Roman Empire, and the remains of the Roman fort of Gerulata survive in the southern suburb of Rusovce. Slavs settled the area from about the 6th century, and the castle hill was an important stronghold of the Moravian principalities in the 9th century. In 907 the Magyars crushed a Bavarian army near the town in a battle recorded under the name Brezalauspurc, and the area passed into Hungary. Its castle became the seat of one of the kingdom's earliest counties, probably under Stephen I.

The town grew as a German-speaking trading centre under Hungarian kings. Andrew III granted it town privileges in 1291, and in the 1460s Matthias Corvinus founded the Universitas Istropolitana, the first university in the territory of present-day Slovakia, though it did not outlive him for long.

The Ottoman victory at Mohács in 1526 and the later fall of Buda transformed the town's status. In 1536 Pressburg became the capital of the part of Hungary that remained under the Habsburg Monarchy. The Hungarian Diet met here until 1848, and from 1563 to 1830 Habsburg rulers, Maria Theresa among them, were crowned kings and queens of Hungary in St Martin's Cathedral. The map's label for these centuries is misleading: the town belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary under Habsburg rule, not directly to the Holy Roman Empire. Joseph II moved the central offices to Buda in 1783, and the town lost its capital role, though its Primate's Palace was the setting for the Peace of Pressburg, signed between Austria and France after Napoleon won at Austerlitz in 1805.

In 1910 the city had about 78,000 people, of whom roughly two-fifths were German speakers, two-fifths Hungarian and about one in seven Slovak. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovak troops entered on 1 January 1919, and the city was given the name Bratislava that March. From 1939 to 1945 it was the capital of the Slovak State, a German client, and its large Jewish community was deported and largely murdered during the Second World War. Most of the remaining Germans and many Hungarians were expelled or left after 1945.

Under communist rule the city expanded rapidly. The huge housing estate of Petržalka rose on the right bank of the Danube, while the building of a new bridge, finished in 1972, swept away much of the old Jewish quarter below the castle. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the peaceful split of Czechoslovakia, Bratislava became the capital of independent Slovakia on 1 January 1993. It now has close to half a million inhabitants and is one of the wealthiest regions in central Europe, with a car industry and service economy closely tied to nearby Vienna.