Who ruled Brussels?

Brussels grew up in the marshy valley of the Senne, a small river in the heart of the Low Countries, at the point where an overland trade route from Bruges and Ghent to Cologne crossed it. The name probably comes from old Dutch words meaning "home in the marsh". A ducal town that became a princely capital, it has been governed in turn by Burgundians, Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, the French and the Dutch, and in the twentieth century it became the seat of the main institutions of the European Union.

The valley lay within the Frankish lands that became the Carolingian Empire, but the town's traditional founding date is 979, when Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine, brought the relics of Saint Gudula to a chapel on an island in the Senne, near a small fortress built in those years. The settlement grew under the dukes of Brabant, princes of the Holy Roman Empire, who made it one of their residences. Wool cloth and luxury crafts made its merchants rich, and two rings of walls were built, in the 13th and 14th centuries. The line of the second wall survives as the inner ring road around the old centre.

In 1430 Brabant passed to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and Brussels became the most splendid seat of the Burgundian court. The painter Rogier van der Weyden worked as its official city painter. The Burgundian lands came to the Habsburgs, and Charles V, who grew up in the Low Countries, gave up his thrones in a ceremony in the Brussels palace in 1555. Under his son Philip II, Brussels was the seat of the governors of the Spanish Netherlands. Resistance to Spanish rule and religious persecution led to the Dutch Revolt, and in 1568 the Counts of Egmont and Horn were beheaded in the Grand Place. The southern Netherlands, including Brussels, remained Catholic and Spanish.

In August 1695 a French army under Marshal Villeroy shelled the city for two days, destroying about a third of its buildings. The guilds rebuilt the Grand Place within a few years in the ornate Baroque style it still has. After the War of the Spanish Succession the region became the Austrian Netherlands, governed for the Habsburg Monarchy from Brussels.

French revolutionary armies annexed the region in 1795, and it remained part of France until Napoleon's defeat at nearby Waterloo in 1815. The Congress of Vienna then joined it to the Netherlands in a single kingdom, with Brussels sharing the role of capital with The Hague. On 25 August 1830 a performance of a patriotic opera at the Théâtre de la Monnaie set off riots that grew into the Belgian Revolution, and Brussels became the capital of independent Belgium, with Leopold I as king from 1831.

The new capital expanded quickly. The polluted Senne was covered over between 1867 and 1871, and broad boulevards were laid on top. Leopold II spent part of the fortune extracted from his private Congo Free State, later the Belgian Congo, on monumental buildings and parks in and around the city. Germany occupied the city in both world wars, from 1914 to 1918 and from 1940 to 1944. French gradually replaced Dutch as the main language of the city's streets, a shift that still shapes Belgian politics.

After 1958 Brussels became home to the European Commission and later the Council of the European Union, and NATO moved its headquarters there in 1967. Since 1989 it has formed a separate Brussels-Capital Region of about 1.2 million people, officially bilingual and among the most international cities in Europe.