Who ruled Bucharest?

Bucharest stands on the small Dâmbovița river in the middle of the Wallachian plain, between the Carpathians and the Danube. It began as a fortified princely residence on a route between the mountains and the river crossings to the south, and it became the capital of Wallachia and then of modern Romania. Its history is one of repeated destruction and rebuilding: by war, fire, plague and earthquake, and finally by a dictator who levelled a large part of the old city for a single palace.

People lived in the area from prehistoric times, and the open plain was crossed for centuries by peoples moving between the steppe and the Balkans, among them Bulgars and Cumans. In the 13th and early 14th centuries the region fell under the overlordship of the Golden Horde, until the principality of Wallachia emerged in the 1300s. A later legend credits a shepherd named Bucur with founding the town, but the first written mention comes in a charter of Vlad III, the prince remembered as Vlad the Impaler, dated 20 September 1459.

Bucharest then shared the role of princely seat with Târgoviște, the older capital closer to the mountains, until Prince Gheorghe Ghica settled the court permanently in Bucharest in 1659. The map shows the city inside the Ottoman Empire from the 1490s, but Wallachia was a vassal principality: it paid tribute and its princes were confirmed, and often chosen, by the sultan, yet it kept its own rulers, nobility and Orthodox church and was never made an Ottoman province. From 1716 to 1821 its princes were Phanariot Greeks appointed from Constantinople. Bucharest was occupied several times by Russian and Austrian armies during their wars with the Ottomans, and a treaty signed in the city in 1812 handed Bessarabia to the Russian Empire. A great fire in March 1847 destroyed around 2,000 buildings, roughly a third of the city.

In 1859 Wallachia and Moldavia chose the same prince, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and from 1862 Bucharest was the capital of the united state, soon called Romania. Full independence from the Ottomans followed in 1878, and a kingdom was proclaimed in 1881. In the decades before 1914 the city was rebuilt on French models, with boulevards, the Romanian Athenaeum and grand public buildings, and it won the nickname "Little Paris". Central Powers troops occupied it from December 1916 until the end of the First World War, after which it became the capital of a much enlarged Romania.

Allied bombing damaged the city in 1944, and on 23 August of that year King Michael's coup in Bucharest took Romania out of its alliance with Germany. Communist rule followed. On 4 March 1977 an earthquake killed some 1,500 people, most of them in Bucharest. In the 1980s Nicolae Ceaușescu had a large part of the historic centre, including churches, monasteries and old residential streets, demolished to make room for a new civic centre dominated by the vast House of the Republic, now the Palace of the Parliament. In December 1989 protests in the capital forced him to flee, and he was executed on 25 December, part of the revolutions of 1989.

Since then Bucharest has grown into the economic centre of Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007. The city has about 1.7 million inhabitants and over two million in its wider area.